Heeeee's BACK! The Return of Q & A
by Alara Rogers
Summary: Sequel to "Q & A". Q answers questions about himself. Posted as a TNG/VOY crossover because technically speaking a lot of stuff that's important to Q, such as the war, his son, his ex, etc, came from Voyager episodes.
1. HEEE'S BACK!

Well, here I am again, after a hiatus of a year by your time or several thousand by mine, but who's counting?

As I look around this place, I realize I don't recognize _any_ of you. Superb! Variety is the spice of life, especially when your life is as long and tedious as mine. Of course, most of you will prove not to be worth my time anyway, but perhaps I'll find a few of you worthy of having a conversation with.

But I suppose this means I need to introduce myself _again..._ (sigh) Why can't you all just be as omniscient as I am, so I never have to do this again?

I am Q, of the Q Continuum. I'm immortal, mostly invulnerable, as nearly omnipotent as _you're_ ever likely to meet... and usually bored out of my mind. This place provided some entertainment, once upon a time; I can only hope it can do so again.

_Write about the word "Impossible"._

**Impossible is not in my vocabulary. Okay, technically it is, since I know everything.**

Impossible?

Excuse me, you must be talking to someone else.

I am a Q. My species is immortal (mostly), omnipresent (on a technicality, at least), and omnipotent (nearly). There is _nothing_ that is impossible for us... just things that our fellow Q don't want us to do, things our own morality suggests might be a bad idea to do, and things we haven't quite figured out how to do yet.

Up until very recently, my people considered it impossible to reproduce in the traditional mortal fashion - that is, for two Q to combine "genetic" material to create a new being, who would start out as an infant and grow in power and ability over time. We'd never needed reproduction - all of us had either been involved in the creation of the Continuum, and therefore had been translated from mortal beings into the immortal, ineffable entities we are today, or had been created full-blown as adolescents by those early pioneers, in order to help out around the house. For billions of years we hadn't bothered to actually create any new Q; we occasionally invited a mortal to be translated into one of our number, but that's not reproduction, that's assimilation.

But two old friends of mine had the brilliant idea of reproducing a new Q from scratch by taking mortal bodies and having a kid with them. And then, after their antics upset the Continuum so badly that they were executed and events were triggered which eventually led to civil war, I upped the ante by figuring out how to reproduce a new Q *as* a Q, without the intermediary of a mortal form. I am thus the sometimes-proud-but-more-often-pissed-off daddy of the only Q ever to be born as an infant within the Continuum.

So see? Nothing is impossible. You just have to figure out how to do it. Oh, and then live with the consequences of what you've done for the rest of eternity.

* * *

_Notes: This is a sequel to my story "Q & A" here on fanfiction dot net. The original was posted to livejournal under the account "qcontinuum"; most of it consisted of answering questions from the site Theatrical Muse, in character as Q, although the in-story justification is that Q found some sort of multidimensional nexus of questions and decided to start showing up and answering them because he was bored. As the story was originally written, it was a hypertext story, where there were a large number of linkbacks to previous sections; ff dot net might still be stripping links, so if they do, "created full-blown as adolescents" refers to chp. 32 of the previous story, "taking mortal bodies and having a kid with them" chp. 42, "sometimes-proud" chp. 33, "pissed-off" chp 31. I set the links to go to ff's own copies because if I were programming anti-spam de-HTML I would allow references to the site I'm actually posting to on the grounds that presumably if I had spammed it, administrators could take down my spam an cancel my account, so there ought to be very little spam actually posted as stories to ff net, but I've been with these guys since 1999 and i've known them to throw babies out with the bathwater for years, so I don't know if they actually allow internal references either._

_"Q & A" takes place when Junior is still a small child, but after the pro novel "I, Q". This sequel takes place after the Voyager episode "Q2", at some unspecified point in Q's life. _

_I am rating this story T but since some of my posts on livejournal were posts to erotic prompt sites, some of which I think were really funny, I may do a side M-rated story for the erotica prompts._

_Regarding pairings: Q's not monogamous. He will actually explain this to you ad nauseam, because he finds the idea of monogamy morally offensive. That's not me, that's him. He's also omnisexual and panspecial (John de Lancie referred to it as bispecial, meaning love for two species, but I can't see Q limiting himself to just humans and Q), so if you're offended by the notion of genderless energy beings having the hots for male humans I have no idea why you are reading this. So there are references to Picard/Q, Janeway/Q, Q/Amanda Rogers, Q/Suzy Q, and well pretty much anyone else Q is interested in that he can talk into bed or wishes he could. Also, for all 2 of you who are also fans of Suzy-Q, like I am... Q is still mad at her, but Q is not a reliable narrator. If you want to know what I think about Suzy-Q and her relationship with Q and their son, my stories "Hurt The Ones You Love", "Tainted", "Mistress of War", "Mother Q", "The Descent of the War Goddess", "Four Times Q Faced The Apocalypse", and "A Tale of Two Q" are either Suzy-Q POV or Suzy-Q centric. Q's opinion of his ex is... well, let's just say he's biased. She is not actually a total bitch. Well, no, actually she is, but she has her reasons and besides, Q's an asshole, so they were well matched and they still would be if Suzy-Q and Junior could kiss and make up, which they are both too stubborn to do, yet._


	2. I don't have parents, exactly

_Write about a lie your parents told you._

**I don't have parents, but I do have a Continuum.**

As I've mentioned before, I don't have parents, I was (*1) created more-or-less full-blown by an entire Continuum, all of whom have at one point or another felt they had the right to act _in loco parentis_ toward me, so I suppose you could say I have nearly a thousand parents. Except that when we act together as the Continuum, we act in concert as an overmind, which makes the Continuum sort of one entity. And it is, in a way, my parent.

So, has the Continuum ever lied to me?

Not knowingly, I don't think. "You have all of eternity ahead of you to explore" wasn't a lie, though it turned out not to be true, because at the start of eternity none of us realized how finite the universe really was. The exploring ended after about three billion years, but who expects anyone who hasn't experienced eternity to understand what it entails? I don't blame them for that.

"You are the equal of any other Q" wasn't a lie when they said it, either. It wasn't until after I'd been out exploring for millions of years that I found out that the Q who'd stayed home to analyze the knowledge we explorers sent back had taken over the joint.

Was "We need you to challenge us, to question us, to keep us from stagnation" a lie? Probably they meant it at the time, as much as they came to despise me later for (*2) playing the role they made me for.

And they genuinely believed things like "Q and Q must die for violating the will of the Continuum" or "If we change for the sake of change as you demand, we will all be destroyed!" Hell, some of those things _I_ believed, at the time.

So... the Continuum has told me many things that turned out, in the passage of time, not to be true, but I'm not convinced that any of those things were exactly _lies_. They were things that were sincerely believed at the time.

Maybe they lied to me by omitting to tell me, when they (*3) took away my powers, that they were continuing to monitor my behavior and I was _actually_ on probation, not out-and-out sentenced to death. But then, they never actually _said_ "you will never get your powers back, you will never return to the Continuum" - they just said they were exiling me and I had to choose what kind of mortal to be, and no, I couldn't choose to be sent to the heart of a supernova because they weren't going to kill me, so pick something I thought I could survive. In retrospect maybe I could have guessed that that meant I was on probation - given how short mortal lives are, why would they otherwise have cared how long my mortal life would be? So no, I suppose that wasn't a lie either.

* * *

_Footnotes: (*1) "Q & A" chp 32, (*2) "Q & A" chp. 3, (*3) "Q & A" chp. 27 - fanfiction dot net strips links and the original was a hypertext story with links to prior chapters, so I am footnoting since I can't hyperlink here._


	3. Trying to answer stupid questions

Actually, there were quite a few questions I missed while I was gone for a year or so your time, but I can't be bothered to answer them _all._ Some, however, are interesting enough to take on.

Of course, it's amazing to me how many of these questions _have no bearing on my existence whatsoever._

But what's life without a little bit of challenge? I picked out some of the least stupid of the stupidest questions, to see if I could actually come up with an answer that makes sense for any of them.

* * *

_If you could have any mutant/super power, which one would it be, and what would you do with it? (If you already have a mutant or super power, what one would you trade it in for?)_

**Super Q!... oh for the sake of all, that sounds so incredibly idiotic.**

I am for all intents and purposes omnipotent, immortal and invulnerable. There _aren't_ any superpowers I don't have, and having them all, why would I ever want to trade?

However, since I'm trying to answer in the spirit of the questions and not simply dismiss them as unutterably stupid, I will take this to mean: if I couldn't be omnipotent, what superpower would I want?

First, of course, we need to define the _base_ set of powers. All mortal creatures have some sort of power, even if it's only the power to reproduce and engulf food a la an amoeba. A Terran rat would look at humans' 20/20 vision the way humans look at Kryptonian x-ray vision. A Vulcan doesn't consider telepathy a superpower any more than human women consider the ability to make human men drool and lose most of their intellect a superpower, and they feel about equally ambivalent about using such an ability, for similar reasons. So what's the base set of abilities that we define such that anything on top of it is a "superpower"?

For simplicity's sake, since most of the people reading this are humans, humanoids, or familiar with humans, I will define the base set of abilities as those possessed by Terran humans, and anything more than that as a superpower.

Now, superpowers break out into, essentially, five verbs: the power to know (telepathy, clairvoyance, enhanced sense of smell beyond human norm), the power to do (telekinesis, super strength), the power to go (time travel, teleportation, flight), the power to live (regeneration, immortality) and the power to be (shapeshifting, illusion.) Of those, if I could only have one, I'd take the power to do. Telekinesis, even if I can't have it at the level where I can create an entire planet with a single thought, would be preferable to any of the others, assuming I can't have more than one. The power to know produces great boredom if you know too much, and doesn't offer many opportunities for self-defense; the power to live isn't interesting all by itself, and I'd rather have a short life full of fun than a long boring one if I can't have a long fun life; I already have the power to be and hardly ever use it, preferring to present myself in different aspects through force of personality and acting skills rather than out-and-out shapechanging; and I was really torn on the power to go because I enjoy that one a lot, but the basic human set of abilities _does_ include the ability to make tools and use them to go places. I mean, it's a tossup, and I might be persuaded to take the power to go instead of the power to do... but the power to go is the power to go _somewhere_, and then once you're there what do you do with it? Ordinary human going abilities are better than their doing abilities.

So I'll take telekinesis or something closely related.

* * *

_If you could completely start your life over from scratch, what would you do differently the second time around (if anything)? Why?_

**If I had to do it all over again... I'd rather not**

(*1) I don't believe in regrets. You are who you are because of all the things that have happened to you and all the things you have done. If you did something different, you wouldn't be the person you are today, and often, if you were the person you were then, you couldn't have done anything differently. It's not that I don't believe in free will - I do. But I believe that what we freely choose to do is constrained by our natures. I _could_ become a missionary and go about the galaxy spreading peace, love and understanding, but I _wouldn't_ because that's not who I am. Doesn't mean I don't freely choose not to do that - no one is forcing me not to be a missionary - but my own nature dictates what I will freely choose to do.

I hurt a friend very, very badly once. But I did it because (*2) she hurt me, and she hurt me because I was trying to protect her and she took it wrong. If I knew then what I know now, maybe I could have made a different choice... but I wouldn't want to start my life over from scratch knowing everything then that I know now. My god, how tedious would _that_ be? The great joy of my existence is that I can remember what it felt like _not_ to know everything, and there's no mistake I've made in my life so awful that I would give up that joy simply to rectify the mistake.

Would I choose to have been a different person if I could be remade and live my life over from the beginning?... mostly, no. If I had a little less of a temper I might not have done some (*3) particularly mean things I've done to people that I regret, but on the other hand, I might have rolled over and been a doormat more often. If I thought harder before I took actions I might not have done some spectacularly dumb things, but then again, I'd be a less spontaneous person in general and that would make me less fun to be around, and my life would have been duller. So no. Everything interconnects. There are things I have done that I regret, but I did them because it was my nature to do them and if I hadn't done them, it would have been because I was a different person with a different nature, and I don't want to not be me.

Now if I could go back in time and tell myself not to do certain things, sure, there are things I would try to talk myself out of. But I'm a stubborn ass with a rep for never listening to other Q, so why would I listen to my future self? Probably I'd have done exactly what I did the first time around even if I-in-the-future was able to go back and tell me-in-the-past not to do it. (And in case you're wondering, this is one of the (*4) very few exceptions to the rule of omnipotence. Q are so large and have such a profound impact on the timestream and there are so few of us in our _own_ timeline that we cannot do this; a Q going back in time to change their own or any other Q's actions would create a paradox that could destroy the Continuum, although we can freely move around in and alter _your_ timeline. But I've given mortals, who _are_ allowed to change their own pasts without it destroying everything, the opportunity to change their own pasts... and it never works out well for them, so I don't imagine it would for me either.)

* * *

_"You've temporarily turned into a child" - what do you do? If you could pick anyone in the world, alive or dead, to be your parents, who would it be and why?_

**If I were a child... and had parents**

Firstly, I don't have parents and I was never a child. So these are rather alien concepts to me.

But alien concepts can be fun. So let's try a little thought experiment. If I were suddenly turned into a child, what would that mean? A human starship captain of my acquaintance was temporarily turned into a child, but only physically - his mind was unaffected, and while he ended up changing his behavior, it's because his species are so utterly convinced that behavior which is appropriate from an adult looks ridiculous when a child does it and vice versa that he was forced by social opprobrium to stop acting like a starship captain, and then playact at throwing a temper tantrum in order to save his crew from some Ferengi.

Now, see, this wouldn't happen to me. Because I have no inherent form, and I don't care about anyone else's social rules. If I wanted to appear as a child and act like a child, it would be because I felt like playing the role of a child, and if I wanted to appear as a child and act like an adult, it would be because I wanted to mess with mortal minds. "You've temporarily turned into a child" only makes sense in my case if it affects my mind as well - if in my very essence I somehow became a child, or thought I had become a child. Which means I would have some serious amnesia going on, because I'd have to forget five billion years of knowledge, and probably my very identity. And that means I probably wouldn't know I have powers, or how to use them properly. Which means I'd need someone to take care of me while I was running around thinking I was a child, which means we're back to that parent question.

Well, mortals know how to be parents better than the Q do, for the simple reason that most of them _had_ parents. But what mortal would understand how to educate and guide an omnipotent child? If I figured out my powers I could annihilate them because they wouldn't let me stay up late and eat Twinkies for dinner. Besides, I don't actually know any mortals I'd trust with the job. As funny as the thought of inflicting my child-self on Picard is, the fact is, mortals consider it a truism that they turn into their own parents when they have kids, and having seen how he interacted with _his_ father... just, no. Likewise, while I thought Kathy Janeway would have made a fine mom for _my_ child, the fact is that she's a stern martinet who's addicted to rules and who will steamroller any man who she'd actually agree to sleep with. She would have worked for my kid's mother because my kid would have had me for a dad, but since I wouldn't have me for a dad (hell, no; I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm pretty sure that I'd be a terrible father if there were any other fathers in the Continuum to compare me to), and she would never pick a dad for me who could stand up to her, there would be no one to encourage my natural desires to break rules and have fun. So Kathy's out. And, as I said, there are no mortals who I think would really know what they were doing regarding the raising of an _omnipotent_ child anyway. So my parents would have to be Q.

Well, aside from the paradox involved, I'm out. As I said, I don't know what I'm doing and I don't think I'm a very good father. My ex is far, far worse than I am, having (*5) abandoned our son and said very cruel things to him in the course of doing it, so she's out. And we are the only living Q who have ever been parents.

But I'm allowed to pick dead people, and there were other Q who were parents, they're just dead. Our first Q child ever was born to two Q who'd taken human form, who were then killed, and grew up as a human named Amanda before I recruited her back into the Continuum. (*6) Amanda's mother was, from my perspective as an adult Q, an idiot. She was so besotted with love for her baby and so irresponsible and cavalier with her obedience to the Continuum that she was killed for it. But from the _baby's_ perspective... she loved that little thing to distraction. And I don't know how she would have related to Amanda as Amanda grew up, if she'd lived; I mean my ex loved our baby when he was born too. But from what I saw, she'd have done anything for that kid. And she had a great sense of fun, and would never have held back on letting me explore the wilder side of my nature if I'd been her kid. So I guess if I had to be a child and I could pick any person, living or dead, for a mother, I'd pick her.

Of course, the fact is she _did_ die. And her boyfriend, who would have thrown Amanda under a bus in a heartbeat if it wouldn't have upset his lover so badly, was an idiot for the love of an adult Q, not an idiot for the love of a baby, and that makes it worse. I don't want that moron for a father. If he hadn't been so willing to follow her dumb ideas, and had actually put up an argument, maybe they'd both be alive.

I have an, mmm, older sister is probably the best way to describe her - a Q created in the first wave, after the Continuum already existed but before there were a large number of new Q created in it. And she's always been something of a nurturer - her role within the Continuum was to train and educate the new Q that would come along. I mean, we were created as teens, not children, but we still needed someone to watch over us, keep us from being complete idiots and guide us into better control over our powers. My sister has a terrible habit of falling in love with mortals, she's overly fond of mortal children, and despite all this she has managed to argue with a straight face that the Q should have no contact with mortals because we're bad for them. So she's something of a hypocrite. But she takes no crap from anyone, she doesn't let fellow Q get away with stupid ideas on her watch if she can possibly talk them out of it, and while she actually likes kids, she's not so besotted with them as to be a dumbass about it. If _she_ had been Amanda's father and not the guy who actually was, Amanda would never have been lost to the Q for eighteen years of thinking she was human, because her parents wouldn't have died. She would probably be the best choice to counterbalance Amanda's mother's over-softness toward her baby. So if I have to pick a Q to be my father, I pick her. (And yes, I do realize that according to your silly binary gender rules I should not be picking a being I refer to as female to be a father, but the Q don't have gender so my sister can damn well be my father if she wants to be. She just prefers a female avatar because she's obsessed with romantic love and she likes kids. Among most mortals, that's considered a feminine role.)

* * *

_Footnotes: (*1) "Q & A" chp 28, (*2) "Q & A" chp 30, (*3) "Q & A" chp 36, (*4) "Q & A" chp 8, (*5) "Q & A" chp 16, (*6) "Q & A" chp 42_


	4. HUMANS FOUND SAPIENT SO NYAAH NYAAH

_Prompt: Headlines._

_Technically_ speaking, we don't have headlines. Or newspapers. We have packets of discrete information containing the observations and perceptions we want to share with the Continuum, the personal memories attached to those observations (often heavily edited, although eventually, the raw memories _do_ end up entering the Continuum's "database"), and generally an organizing structure of logic pointing out the conclusions we drew from these observations and why, which we push out to the rest of the Continuum in a format kind of more similar to an email, if an email was sent directly to your brain with hyperlinks that would allow you to enter someone else's brain and fully experience their memories in living color.

But Q are getting updates like this all the time, and usually, we ignore them. If the information's important, it's going to end up entering the Continuum database anyway and we can get it when we want to. Updates that tell us all about some incredibly trivial piece of new information no one cares about bombard us _constantly_... so we mostly do exactly what you do. We delete them without reading them.

In order to get people to actually pay attention to an idea that you want to broadcast to the entire Continuum, you put a header on it that will grab people's attention. Such as "I'm Ready To Die, How About You?" or "Harassing The Baby Because She Was Raised By Humans Just Makes You An Asshole".

When the Continuum ordered me to perform a test on humanity that was supposed to definitively prove whether or not they were sapient, except that it was an incredibly dumb test, and they ordered me to destroy the species if they failed the test... I was deeply unhappy with the idea, but because I was afraid that if I disobeyed they'd (*1) take my powers away again, I did it. (Also, to be scrupulously fair, the idea of testing humanity for sentience was not only my idea but something I pulled in every marker I had to get, because if humanity passed it would protect the species from the Continuum's stupider ideas. So of course they dictated the actual terms of the test and made it contingent on one of the stupidest ideas they ever had, deliberately, just to screw with me.) But I cheated outrageously.

The test they wanted performed involved time travel and whether or not humans could grasp non-linear time operations. I thought this had been pretty well established, and it doesn't exactly define a sapient species anyway, so it was neither a necessary nor a sufficient test, _plus_ ordering me to kill them if they failed it was just insulting. I _knew_ there was no good reason for that and some within the Continuum were just seeing how far they could push me. So, although my chosen exemplar of humanity had already had some experience with time travel, I went back in time and inserted some more incidents for him to deal with just to make sure he'd have the experience he needed when he faced the dumb test the Continuum was making me perform on him. I also randomly made some friends of his I don't even like deal with alternate universes and time-jumping to make sure he'd have intelligent advisers when the time came. (Well, I picked Worf. "Intelligent" advisers may be overstating the case. But I didn't need the Klingon screwing things up with _bad_ advice.) And then I dropped outrageous hints all throughout the test. I came within a hairsbreadth of flat-out giving away the answer, in fact.

And then, after he passed the test (of course), I sent out an update with the headline "Humans Found Sapient, So Nyaah Nyaah Nyaah."

Predictably, most of the people who returned comment on the update felt the need to point out that I was being incredibly childish and immature... but you know what? They _read_ it, which is more than most Q can say about _their_ mass-broadcast Continuum updates.

* * *

_Footnotes: (*1) "Q & A" chp 27_


	5. Religion

_Note: In the series, while Q occasionally plays with religious concepts in obvious mockery, such as claiming to be God after Picard dies or dressing up as a monk, the fact that he has the power of a god and yet tolerates mortals telling him to get off their ship has always made me believe that Q actively avoids being worshipped, to the extent that he can. His rants about religion should be taken from the perspective of someone who's had bad experiences with being worshipped as a god and who's seen what worship has done to other omnipotents he knows, not from the perspective of a mortal._

* * *

_Prompt: Religion._

Ah, religion. Words cannot describe how _much_ I despise this construct.

You see, mortals are right, to guess that there are entities far more powerful than they are, beings eternal and puissant with the ability to transform their petty little lives. Yes, indeed, what you call "gods" exist. _That_ is not my problem with religion.

My problem is with the worship. And more specifically, with the fact that you cannot be bothered to actually _understand_ what you worship.

**"We're lowly! We're not worthy! We're going to totally ignore everything you say in favor of what we wanna believe you said, but nonetheless we really worship you!**

Firstly, of course, while I understand the impulse to fling yourself at my feet in awe at my vast superiority, why are you bothering? Yes, you're lowly and pathetic, and I'm better than you. I get that. I am _far_ more aware of the full extent of my vast superiority to you than you are, in fact. So why do you think it would interest me, or that I would be willing to use my powers to help you, for you to point this out? Kneel at my feet and sing about how wonderful I am and how unworthy you are of my aid? _Why_ is this supposed to compel me to aid you? You're not making your case.

You imagine that I am like you. If you were like me, you think, if _you_ had the powers of a god, _you_ would demand that your fellow mortals kneel and pay you obeisance. And that is the difference between me and you. Beyond my power, beyond your weakness, that is _why_ you're inferior to me. You cannot grasp that to me, making you worship me is rather like having cockroaches worship you would be to you. What would be the _point?_ I am not one of you, to get an emotional thrill out of your subservience to me. I don't need you to tell me about how great I am. I KNOW. What's _valuable_ about you that I should care? I know how wonderful _I_ am, but what's good about _you_ that I should want to do anything for you? And telling me how much you love me also misses the point. Why do I care that _you_ love me and worship me? Who the hell are you? Make your case that _you_ are an interesting person. And here's a hint: no one is interesting when they're on their knees. Well, unless there are leather and safewords involved.

Secondly. If you're going to worship a powerful being, and you believe that being actually exists, why don't you pay attention to what he, she or it has actually _said_ you should do, rather than what you imagine? If someone has come to you and said, "Have fun! Be creative! Enjoy parties! Think for yourself!", why, oh why, do you turn this into "Kill the infidel?" Or, worse yet - something that's happened to a few friends of mine - if someone came to you and said, "Love your fellow mortals! Promote peace, love and understanding! Be nice to each other!", _how_ did you get "Kill the infidel" out of _that?_ I mean, if you're worshipping some imaginary thing you made up, and you _understand_ that fact, okay, fine. You're not going to pay any price for totally ignoring what an imaginary thing you made up actually told you to do rather than what you want it to have said you should do. But if your god is _real_, aren't you just a little afraid of pissing him, her or it off when said entity figures out how badly you have screwed up its instructions?

So I have no respect for religion. The mortals who worship powerful beings are pretty universally both insecure idiots _and_ totally self-centered - they talk a great game about how inferior they are and how great their god is, but then prove that they don't really believe any of that by simply rewriting whatever their god actually told them into whatever it is they wanted to do anyway. And the _gods_ who tolerate this crap are even worse. I mean, I can't blame mortals for wishing that super-powerful beings would look kindly on them or do nice things for them... but the _gods_ who let mortals kneel down and sing their praises are TOTALLY PATHETIC.

I don't think you necessarily have to go as far as I go, and show up to torment beings who worshiped you just so they decide you're a demon and stop asking you for stuff... you _could_ just benignly tolerate it. A lot of my friends do. But if you actually _go_ to some planet and deliberately set yourself up as a god so pathetic tiny little mortals will worship you... there is something seriously wrong with you. I'd recommend a therapist if there were any such thing for omnipotent beings. Maybe you ought to consider why you're not getting enough love from your pantheon, or your feelings of isolation and loneliness and how you could solve them by hanging out with your fellow Beings of Power rather than spending all your time pining for the love of tiny short-lived creatures with the brains of a jumbo shrimp.


	6. I swear

_Prompt: I swear..._

I swear I didn't put those time-traveling invisible aliens all over your engine room, Picard. No, I mean it. Pinky swear. I mean, seriously, why do you always blame me for these kind of things? It's like you see me and immediately think, "Oh, Q must be the explanation for all these mysterious things that are happening!" and never bother to explore it any further. Really, Jean-Luc, I expected better from you.

Let's be realistic, now; have I ever bothered to create a scenario and dump you into it, instead of just watching with amusement as the universe itself presents you with a puzzle? Okay, yes, Robin Hood, but that doesn't count; it was obvious that it was me, and I admitted it. Yes, yes, I did send Riker and your bridge crew to that planet with the animal things, but I admitted to that one too. And okay, fine, I sent you back in time to your past, and yes, I did expose you to the Borg, but you _knew_ I was doing those things. I never created some situation and then left you to puzzle it out on your own for hours or days before showing up, now did I?

Okay, yes, you got me, that's exactly what I did with that temporal anomaly test. But, well, I didn't invent that jellyfish at Farpoint, now did I?

I'm not making this argument well, am I?

Right, then. Jean-Luc, you'll just have to trust me this time. I did _not_ in any way entice, allow, induce or otherwise facilitate those time-traveling invisible aliens to invade your ship, and no, I didn't create them either. I'm just here to watch you defeat them. And eat popcorn. Want some? It's got extra butter.


	7. Letters I will never send

I actually rather like the letter format. It allows you to say things to people without giving them any opportunity to talk back to you, so they can't interrupt or misunderstand before they're done reading the thing. Also, it allows you to talk to people and then destroy the letter without them ever actually reading it. I know, I could just have a conversation with someone and then wipe their memory (well, if they're not a Q, anyway), but that seems like cheating.

_Prompt: Write a fan letter._

**The great thing about sending letters to dead people is, they're dead, so you don't even have to go to the effort of not sending it.**

Dear Q,

I am pretty sure that even if I intended to send you this letter, the fact that you're dead would raise some fairly insurmountable difficulties, even for me. But then, the terms under which I'm writing this letter don't require that I need to be able to _send_ it.

I wish you could see what you've brought about. I mean, if you could, maybe you wouldn't have (*1) chosen to die, and then you wouldn't have brought it about, so from a certain perspective maybe it's just as well, but y'know, I'm having a hard time with that logic. Yes, if you weren't dead, your principled stand in favor of your right to die wouldn't mean all that much, and your death wouldn't have terrorized half the Continuum into agreeing with me that we'll all die if we don't change, and then we wouldn't have had the war, and I wouldn't have won it if we hadn't had it, and thus nothing would have changed and the Continuum would still be stagnating. I don't care. I wish you weren't dead.

I'm sorry I voted with the others to lock you up in that comet; that kind of imprisonment for something you believed in was horribly unfair. At the time I thought it was the only way to save your life. Yes, I know I'm missing the point. You wanted to die, you were bored senseless by existence, continued immortality was merely refined torture, yadda yadda yadda. I _still_ think you were wrong. Life is worth living if you look hard enough for the things that make it worth it. But I know. The point is that it was _your_ belief that your life was not worth living, and you were as much of a Q as I was, my equal, my comrade. Who in the universe was I to say you were wrong or misguided about what you wanted to do with your life? Who were any of us?

Freedom is the freedom to do things other Q don't like and don't approve of, otherwise it's hardly freedom. I can't very well champion freedom for myself and then turn around and say you didn't deserve yours. But you know all that because I told you when I gave you the poison to kill yourself. Except, of course, that you don't know anything. Being that you're dead, and all.

You transformed the Continuum. I just picked up the banner you carried and ran with it. I wasn't brave enough to stand up for my beliefs without your example to follow; if you weren't dead, I'd probably still be cowering in terror of the Continuum's disapproval. You were a braver Q than I ever was. And I'm glad for your sake that you got what you wanted, that we finally let you have your freedom, that you're at peace now. But for all that... well, I'm still a selfish creature. I still wish you weren't dead. Because I miss you.

Your friend,

Q

* * *

_Prompt (pt 2): Write two letters: One to someone you hurt and the other to someone who hurt you._

**Maybe I'll actually send this one... and maybe not**

Dear Q,

No, this isn't you about hurting me. Although you (*2) did. But I can give as good as I get, you know that. And in the end, I am a highly respected member of the leadership council of the Continuum and you are slumming in Klingon bars or fighting wars against the Vulcans on Andor and everyone laughs at you behind your back, so I'm pretty sure I came out on top in this one. Nyaah nyaah nyaah. Where's your "I'm a respectable member of the Continuum and you're an immature brat" attitude now?

No, I have nothing to say to you about the way you hurt me. But I've got something to say about what you did to our son.

He still loves you, you know. Yes, I think he's a moron for it. But he says he can't help it; he only has two parents and you're one of them, and he can't _not_ have you for a mother just because you're a bitch.

I don't want you to come back and reconcile with him because I ever want to see your face again; far from it. In fact, I would be personally happier if you never saw _him_ again, either. I had to deal with centuries of the crying and the "Why did Mommy go away?" and the "If I completely change my personality will Mommy love me again?" Honestly, I don't need to deal with it. I'd be better off if he could cut you entirely out of his life, like I did.

But apparently he can't. I've tried to get him to do so, believe me, but he says I don't understand because I don't have a mother. Which, you gotta admit, he has a point there. Neither of us know what it means to have a parent. If he says that he misses you and he loves you and he wants to see you again, because you're his mom, well, I may think he's an idiot all I want but I can't escape the fact that you _are_ his mom, and I can't be everything to him because I'm only half of him and you're the other half, much as I wish it were otherwise.

I couldn't reject the Continuum when I thought they hated me and wanted no part of me; I thought it would be different for him because _I'm_ there for him, and at least some of the Continuum doesn't despise him. But no. He says he needs you.

So, since I don't want to see him have to beg and crawl back to you crying for Mommy, I will contact you myself. How about you stop being such a selfish witch and try being a mom for once? Come home and see your kid, for the love of all. And maybe try not to be such an ass when you talk to him. A lot of those negative traits you hated when you saw in him _didn't_ come from me, you know. He's not a mortal; he doesn't have recessive genes. Half of what he is comes from you, and if you don't like it, maybe take a good hard look at yourself before you bitch at him.

I'll bury the hatchet if you will. Just come home and see him again.

With no love,

Q

* * *

_Prompt (pt 1)/Prompt: (Write a letter)... to someone you hurt.../ Write a letter to anyone about anything. Say what you have always wanted to say but have been afraid to._

**Definitely not sending this one. I think.**

Dear Jean-Luc,

I am absolutely certain that I'm never actually going to send you this letter. _Almost_ absolutely certain. Pretty certain, anyway. I mean, the universe is an uncertain place, so nothing is ever _certain._ But the more I contemplate the thought of actually sending this letter and letting you actually read it, the more I want to never write it in the first place, so if I'm going to get it written I think I need to at least vigorously pretend that I am absolutely certain you will never see it.

I'm sorry.

See? See? That's why I'm never sending you this letter. Because I don't apologize. For anything. Being omnipotent means never having to say you're sorry, right? And if I did say I was sorry I bet you wouldn't be gracious about it anyway, noooo. You'd be all "Well, you _should_ be sorry. You've done atrocious things, Q," and "Well, I'm glad to see humanity rubbing off on you," as if humanity is the sole source of all positive traits in the multiverse and I couldn't possibly come up with an idea like apologizing to you unless I was thoroughly contaminated by contact with your species.

And it wouldn't do any good anyway. I mean, I'm sorry? What's the point in that? It doesn't fix anything, does it? Would it make you more inclined to trust me, or think more kindly of me, because you know that when I screw things up because of my temper and my cowardice and totally ruin your life I feel _bad_ about it? Oh, I'm sure that's helpful. "Yes, I was raped by the Borg and transformed into a monster and I killed 11 thousand of my own comrades but it's all going to be fine because Q is _sorry_ about it." I'm sure.

But... I am sorry. For whatever infinitesimal amount it's worth.

I wanted... I wanted things to be different. I wanted to show you the universe. I wanted to teach you about the Borg, not (*3) set you up to be nearly destroyed by them.

I wanted to be your friend. Should have paid more attention to mythology... or the life experience of practically every other Q I know. I could have been your friend if you hadn't known I have godlike power, if I'd restrained myself from ever using it around you. But you already _knew_ who I was by the time I realized I wanted to befriend you, and I wanted to be myself. I didn't want to lie to you and hide who I was. I mean, it's not like I really look like what I look like when I'm with you, of course, but to your inferior mind the image of the thing is the thing, so taking a different form and never telling you I was Q _would_ have been a lie.

But it doesn't work, a god and a mortal. It never has and probably never will. You understood that, that's why you told me no.

And that's why...

I was so _angry_ with you. To be fair, you were being totally pompous. I knew you had no chance against the Borg without my help, but not you - utterly self-important, convinced your little species had it together and you could stand up to anything the universe threw at you. I knew better. But that wasn't an excuse.

I could have tried a little harder to hide my presence from the Borg, created a wormhole and thrown you through it rather than just dragging you across space. Then maybe you wouldn't have been such a priority for them, if they hadn't known you interested _me._ I could have annihilated that particular cube after it encountered you, before it had a chance to upload back to the Collective. But... I didn't. Because after you broke down and asked for my help, after you admitted that you needed me to save you from a situation you'd never have been in if I hadn't put you there, I was going to help you. I was going to give you advice, when you encountered the Borg for real. I had this whole elaborate plan about this Charles Dickens thing where I was going to be the Ghost of Past and Alternate Presents and Future and I was going to show you how the Borg got involved with your species in the first place and the things that had happened in other timelines and the things that might happen to you if you didn't do anything about it, and you'd have had a big chunk of information you and your Starfleet could have used to fight them off, and maybe you'd have bruised them so bad they wouldn't have come back in your lifetime. So I didn't think I needed to hide myself from the Borg; in fact it suited my plans at the time to accelerate the time table. I wanted to make sure that there wouldn't be too long a gap between my preparing you for the Borg and their actual arrival.

But, well, you know. The Continuum (*4) took my powers away. You know that, you were there. What you don't know is that after they did it they forbade me to interfere between you and the Borg. I argued that I caused the situation - or accelerated it, anyway, they'd have been on their way no matter what but I sped things up - and the Continuum argued that that didn't matter because I was a screwup and I was too personally involved with your species and I'd actually tried to go live with you, with my powers, and plainly I had no self control when it came to you. So no, I wasn't allowed to help. At all.

So I watched what they did to you. And I was too terrified of being made mortal again to defy the Continuum. There was nothing I could do, but watch. I almost chickened out on even that much, to be honest. I mean, I don't really care about your fights with your girlfriends or your little dance with Crusher or your cute little diplomatic missions like you have to single-handedly bring peace to the entire galaxy, and I don't feel a great deal of angst when I see you getting shot at because I'm pretty sure you'll find a way to handle the situation and if you don't, well, I'm allowed to save your life personally if I can make the case that it won't change the course of human affairs much... but seeing the Borg take you over, knowing how you felt about it and knowing there was nothing I could do... that hurt. I am not used to empathizing with my favorite mortals. You're supposed to be exciting and entertaining and disposable. I'm not supposed to suffer when I see you in pain. But I did.

Maybe I'd eventually have gotten up the courage to do something about it if your pals hadn't found a way to save you anyway. Maybe I wouldn't have. I don't know. I can find out a lot about what I might have done or did do in some alternate timeline, but that one, I've never wanted to know.

I know you still have nightmares. I know, every so often when they get really loud, you can still hear the Borg. I also know that maybe it was best for your entire species that it was you it happened to. You're the one who was friends with an android, who could link with you and try to pull you out of it, and now you have this connection you can use to spy on them, occasionally. They might have permanently altered your past if not for that connection, and I am sorry to say that the Q had too much going on at the time to pay attention or stop them, though we usually do interfere with major attempts to shift the timeline like that. We were sort of ramping up for a civil war. Sorry about that, too. I mean, no, I'm not really sorry we had the war because it had to be done, and I won, but I'm sorry it interfered with our duties and you had to go back in time and stop the Borg because we couldn't be bothered. So maybe it's just as well it was you.

I'm supposed to think that way. I'm supposed to be detached, to consider every member of your species fundamentally interchangeable, to be willing to make harsh decisions that sacrifice any one or ten or thirty million of you if it saves the entire species, assuming I even care about saving your species. I am not supposed to want to go back and change it, change everything, save you from the consequences of my acts even if it would mean I would have to directly intervene to protect your people from the Borg afterward. I had to do that in the timeline where you didn't get stabbed, you know; I made someone else, dumped a copy of your personality onto them and had them get assimilated by the Borg so your timeline would work out the same without you. You really are that important. I just couldn't tell you so when I was trying to convince you to change your own past so you'd learn not to want to.

In the "real" timeline, the stable one you live in, the one that's not a construct I invented and then let vanish, I can't go back and change anything _I_ did. So I cannot go back and save you from the Borg. I want you to know that. I would if I could, even though I know it's a terrible idea. Just like, you had a choice between your ship and your friend and you chose your ship and you've regretted it your whole life. I know what I didn't know at the time, that what I did to you _did_ in fact empower you to fight the Borg, that I _did_ save your species by letting you get assimilated. It had the right result... but I did it for the wrong reasons, and it was the wrong thing, and I regret it. I'll never stop regretting it. And if I had the power to do it all over again I'd find another way. I would.

But I can't. Even the Q have limits. That's one of them. I can't change my own past, I can't undo what I did. So there's nothing I can do about what happened to you, because there was nothing I was allowed to do about it then and now it's too late. And I'm sorry.

So, yeah. Me, Q, apologizing. I suppose I can't send this letter, the universe will end. More to the point, why? What good would it do? I mean, maybe it might even make me feel better. I don't like feeling guilt - it's like owing someone a debt or betraying a trust. It's an encumbrance and I don't like them. If I want to be bad, I want to be bad in my own way, unrepentant, uncomplicated, and certainly not feeling guilty about it years later. Who knows, maybe unburdening myself to you would actually make me feel better. But what good would it do you? I can't fix it, so why apologize? It's not going to make it have not happened if I say sorry. Should I do something for you to make it up to you? Like what? A little trip around the multiverse won't really do much for something of this magnitude - it's why I didn't even bring this whole thing up when I was trying to pay back my debt for your saving my life - and something really big, like bringing your brother and nephew back to life? Oh, you'd probably just get mad at me and tell me "Humans die, Q, we're mortal, that's what gives meaning to our existences" and blah blah and be really bothered by the whole thing, and anyway, it'd still be just bribing you to forgive me, and that would be the act of a _total_ loser. I mean, bad enough I feel guilty at all. But just saying "I'm sorry" is so very, very meaningless in the face of something like this. I half expect you'd just slap me for saying it. (Or lecture me. The slapping thing's more Sisko's style.)

I think... I think I do wish I could tell you how I feel. That I'm sorry. But it feels so meaningless. So pointless. Words have only ever borne a passing relation to reality for me anyway. If I was going to apologize I would want to _do_ something but I don't know what.

Well. Someday either I'll figure out what to say or do, or you'll die and render the point moot, right? I'll outlive whatever guilt I feel about what I did or didn't do to you. Someday.

Sincerely, but still absolutely certain I'm never going to tell you _any_ of this,

Q

* * *

_Footnotes: (*1) "Q & A" chp 12 "On the nature of Mu", (*2) "Q & A" chp 16 "Loss and Regret", (*3) "Q & A" chp. 36 "mistakes were made", (*4) "Q & A" chp. 27 "Scary Stories"_


	8. A story about a magic potion

_Prompt: If you could buy a magic potion, what would it be?_

Magic potion? I have no use for such things - I'm omnipotent. Anything anyone could possibly need a magic potion to achieve for them, I can do for myself - if I haven't obtained something I want already, it's because doing so would conflict with my ethics or my other goals, and a magic potion would have the same problems.

But since I've vowed to at least _try_ to answer the questions that don't apply to my personal life, let me tell you a little story about a magic potion. It wasn't me who sought the potion, of course, and the person who did didn't exactly _buy_ it, but... well, let the story speak for itself.

**How I *coughcough* I mean, a wizard and a young hero saved the planet Hialtha with a magic potion**

The planet was called Hialtha by its dominant ruling tribe - a world that meant "Land", which is, distressingly often, what people name their planets. This was a world that had very little iron to speak of, but was rich in silicon. And so, although the people were still mired in superstitition and most of their technology was primitive beyond belief, they had learned to do the most amazing things with glass and other crystalline structures.

This might have been their downfall. A race of techno-thieves who seek to make themselves perfect at the expense of everyone else in the universe, a race that calls themselves the Borg but that the Hialthans called the Soulless Ones, saw the Hialthans' incredible skill with glass and crystal, and they wanted it for themselves. Normally they leave primitive, low-tech worlds alone, but this was one that had actually developed a technology they wanted. And what the Borg want, they take.

Resistance, say the Borg, is futile. It certainly was in this case. The Hialthans fought the Soulless Ones with glass flechettes and crystal bombs. The Soulless Ones had phasers. It was a totally unfair contest.

A young man was trapped in the glass-topped cellar of his home when the Soulless Ones invaded and took his family. He saw them shoot his father, saw them press their fingers to the necks of his mother and sisters, and saw them transform and become white-faced and blank-eyed, their souls stolen like all the rest of the Soulless Ones. The Soulless Ones ignored him - although he could see all that happened through the glass ceiling of the cellar, the glass was one-way and the Soulless Ones could not easily see him. And truthfully, they wouldn't have cared. He wasn't a threat, in their eyes.

He dug himself loose from the cellar and ran for his older sister's village, intending to warn her and her family of what had happened. But he passed village after village destroyed, swarming with Soulless Ones or deserted entirely. And he began to despair. How would anyone ever defeat any of these creatures? They would overrun the whole world, and there was nothing anyone could do.

And then he passed by a wizard, sitting on a large rock.

He knew the man was a wizard, because the man was dressed as a wizard, and because only a fool or a wizard would not be running in fear as the Soulless Ones marched. So he fell to his knees in front of the wizard (this was less a gesture of respect than a reflection of the fact that he had been running for an hour, and was badly out of breath), and said, "Great sir! Are you a wizard?"

The man looked at his fingernails. (Planets can be such dirty places.) "I might be," he said.

"Great sir, do you know of the Soulless Ones overrunning our villages, killing and enslaving our people?"

"Well, if I'm a wizard, it would stand to reason that I know about that, wouldn't it?"

"Please, great sir. Isn't there anything you can do with your magic to save us?"

The wizard considered. "No, probably not. Although, if you were to ask me for something specific to enable _you_ to defeat them, I might be able to manage that."

"You mean... something like a magic potion I could take that would make me strong enough to defeat them?"

"Hm... yes. Yes, exactly like that. I could probably do something like that, if you wanted it badly enough."

"Yes! Yes, great sir! I'll do anything, I'll pay any price! Give me a magic potion that will let me fight the Soulless Ones, and I'll do anything you ask!"

The wizard stood up suddenly. "Be very careful what you ask for, boy. Because the price will be higher than you imagine."

"I would even give my life to save our people!"

"Well, that's good, because that's what it'll cost you."

The young man's face turned blue, which was the color of Hialthans' skin when all the blood rushed away from their extremities, but he stood his ground. "Even if that's your price, great sir, I'll pay it."

"Well, then. Here you are." He reached beneath his tunic and took out a vial, which he handed to the boy. "Drink this, and then go to fight the Soulless Ones. It'll give you the power to destroy them all, and protect the entire world from them, but it will claim your life. If you're truly willing to sacrifice yourself, then drink."

The young man took a deep breath, and then drank the potion.

"What will it do?" he asked. "Will it give me strength, or speed, or magical powers over them?"

"You'll just have to wait and see," the wizard said, and disappeared in a bright flash of light.

The young man was disconcerted by the wizard's disappearance, but then, at least this proved the man _did_ have real magic. With confidence, then, he returned to battle the Soulless Ones.

A fallen soldier had a crystal sword. The young man picked it up, and raced back to the battleground. With a war cry, he launched himself at the first Soulless One he saw, swinging his sword.

The sword bounced off the Soulless One's armor harmlessly. Then the Soulless One grabbed the young man and pressed its fingers to his neck. There was a sharp pain, and a moment of intense heat, and the young man felt faint.

"You promised!" he screamed at the wizard, as his consciousness slipped away. "You said I would save the world!"

"Wait for it," he heard the wizard's voice.

And then he heard nothing but the chorus of a billion billion voices in his head, drowning out everything that he was.

But in his blood, the magic potion churned around the foulness the Soulless Ones had infected him with, and changed it. Instead of connecting him to them as a soulless minion, a single insect in their swarm, the potion crystallized in his brain, sending a signal to the Soulless Ones' blood and changing it just as he had been changed. In each Soulless One who heard the call, the blood turned to crystal and the crystal sent a signal, repeating the call, until every Soulless One on the planet and every Soulless One in the cube orbiting the planet like a dark moon had heard, and been transformed.

Far away, the Queen of the Soulless Ones sensed disruption in her minions. She sent specialized drones who could be disconnected from the rest of the Collective instantly to learn what had happened. And they too heard the call and transformed. The Queen had to destroy them, had to cut off the Borg's connection to the lost cube without ever being able to learn what had happened. For the only way the Borg could learn was to infect others with the dark potion in their blood and make the others one of them, subject to the call of the Queen. And any of the Queens' subjects who could hear the call of the wizard's magic potion in the young man's blood was instantly transformed.

The Borg decided that the glass technology of Hialtha was not worth the loss of any more cubes. It was not all that valuable, and if the Hialthans could destroy the Borg so thoroughly, the Borg would leave them be, for now. After all, resistance is futile and the Borg had all eternity. Eventually they would return to Hialtha, when they had taken the technology from somewhere else that would let them learn what the Hialthans had done. But there was no rush.

On Hialtha, the crystals devoured the brains of the Soulless Ones who'd been infected with them. Everywhere on the world, Soulless Ones dropped dead.

The young man lay dying, his brain slowly turning to crystal. The last thing he saw was the wizard appear before him.

"Well. I told you the price, and you paid it. You ought to feel proud of yourself. Not just anyone would sacrifice their lives to save their planet, you know."

"Was there... no other way?" the young man whispered. "Couldn't they have been saved? My mother... my little sisters..."

"No, you had it right the first time. They lost their souls when the Soulless Ones took them. They were already dead. More or less." The wizard knelt next to him. "If it makes you feel better, I can make sure the others all find out you saved them."

It probably didn't make the young man feel better, because by that time, he was already dead.

But the wizard kept his word. The young man's older sister, the sole survivor of the family, dreamed of all the events that had taken place. When she woke from dreaming her brother's death, she left her babies in her husband's care and returned to her old home town, where she found her father murdered, her mother and sisters transformed into Soulless Ones and dead like all the other Soulless Ones, and her younger brother dead and only partially transformed, as if whatever had killed the Soulless Ones had begun as soon as his transformation started. This convinced her of the truth of her dream, and after weeping for her family and getting her husband's kin to help her cremate their bodies, she began to travel the world with her children in tow, singing the song of how her brother defeated the Soulless Ones.

That was five hundred years ago. The Hialthans still haven't gotten into space - hard to build a warp drive without metal - but the Borg haven't come back. Annoyingly, the Hialthans have decided that the wizard was in fact an avatar of the chief god of their pantheon, come down to protect them, and they've made a complete fetish of the young man's sacrifice. Less annoyingly, the chief holy relic of this new religion are the remnants of the crystals formed when the potion interacted with Borg nanites (the crystals didn't burn when the bodies were cremated, you see)... a useful thing in case the Borg ever do come back, since if powdered and introduced to a mortal's bloodstream, the crystals will still do what they were intended to do, and kill any being containing Borg nanites that can hear their call.

On the other hand, the Continuum cleared up that loophole immediately after I pulled this little stunt (yes, in case your brain has the density of pure lead and you didn't figure it out already, I was the wizard). It used to be, the Q were allowed to provide direct assistance to a mortal species in danger if directly asked, as long as the assistance worked through intermediaries of that species. After I saved Hialtha, we were no longer allowed to provide technology in response to a request for aid, and could only provide _knowledge_ if directly asked. This wasn't the first time they changed the rules to disallow anyone from doing what I'd just done, and it wasn't the last either. You see now why I had to fight a war with these people?

(By the way, it is technically not true that once transformed, Borg can never cease to be Borg, but there was no way that Hialthan technology or culture could handle the level of disruption or the medical care required if the potion had freed the minds of the Hialthan Borg without killing them. That _would_ have required a direct act of Q to manage, and I wasn't allowed to do that. Since explaining Continuum politics to a dying man didn't seem entirely worthwhile, I simply told him there wasn't any other way. Okay, so I lied, but hey, the guy was about to die, and I'm not totally without compassion - telling him "Yeah, we could have saved your mother and sisters but I didn't feel like it" would have been gratuitously cruel even for me.)


	9. Bestest Pals

_Prompt 175: Who's your best friend, and why?_

I have had several best friends, in my existence. It's a little difficult to differentiate them when conversing with mortals, though, because all of them are named Q.

**Somehow I never manage to keep a friend all that long. I wonder why not.**

My first best friend... I don't want to talk about my first best friend. Let's just say that we (*1) hurt each other, badly, and she ended up suffering a fate worse than death, and... I _really_ don't want to talk about her.

My second best friend could be best thought of as my older brother. My partner in crime, the guy who's just like me, only twenty million years older. Of course, he and I (*2) haven't done much hanging out since he got me (*3) thrown out of the Continuum for a day.

My third best friend was, in human terms, my lover. Which makes a lot less sense in Q terms than it does in human terms; all Q share pleasure and intimacy with all other Q, unless there's a huge generational difference (I have, for instance, never joined with one of the pioneers who created the Continuum, except via large group orgies; nor have I ever joined with my son, at all, and if I had a stomach the concept would nauseate me to the point of vomiting. Or Amanda, except during the war, because when someone has just saved your life you tend to forget that they are too young for you.) However, it is true that some Q, you just fit with better than others, and the sex is just really, really good for some reason. (I say "sex" so mortals can understand what I'm talking about. It's really more like merging almost into a single entity, and then, if you really want to get wild, having a contest with the other one to see who can stimulate the other's pleasure more intensely. The entity who gets overloaded first and has to break contact or risk losing their sense of self in the sensations loses. It's the sort of game that actually, a lot of us play to lose, if you know what I mean.)

My ex plays the role of a prim and proper Q when she's here in the Continuum, but out in the mortal world, she takes mortal form and fights alongside them in their wars. And gets killed. A lot. I would never do what she does, and I've called her crazy for it, but I can't help (well, couldn't help) responding to that kind of wildness, that unpredictability. I mean, she enjoys getting shot at. I'm next of kin to Chaos and she's the Goddess of War; we spent a lot of our time fighting viciously with each other, but, oh, the makeup sex was hot.

But, you know, then we had a kid, and then she (*4) walked out on the two of us, and as many bazillions of time as I've walked out on her or she's walked out on me before, there was never an innocent being whose little heart got crushed in the process before. So right now I hate her. Maybe someday we'll get back together; eternity is a long time to hold grudges, but... this is a really serious grudge.

So nowadays, I hang with this guy who's an inventor, a mad scientist type really, whose own long-term companion and favorite lover was killed in the war, protecting me. You'd think he might resent me for it, but it actually brought us together to become friends in the first place - we barely knew each other before (I mean, by Q standards; by human standards we are practically brothers, but after five billion years, you pretty much get to know everyone in your hometown pretty well), and now we're good pals. He builds doodads for my kid, or used to - back when my son was too little to fully channel the power of the Continuum in himself without potentially hurting himself, my friend used to build him "training wheels", devices that would help him channel the power safely.

(Funny but true story: we rarely actually run into alternate versions of ourselves, other Q-selves, in the multiverse. However, apparently there is a universe out there somewhere where someone so similar to my son that the multiverse considers them rough equivalents of each other is actually my son by my first best friend, who is in a long term relationship with my inventor friend, who apparently mistakenly believes that he is the kid's father. Or maybe he's a co-father; I suppose it's possible the Q could form a child in a triad rather than a dyad, but we did get the impression that he thought he was the only father, which speaks to a level of obliviousness that... frankly, sounds just like my friend. Anyway, the alternate version of my son who thought he was my friend's son nearly destroyed the multiverse by tapping into the raw energy of the Continuum and using it to merge the multiverses, and we only managed to escape because my son wasn't an exact analogue to the alternate one, and also apparently the alternate me and Picard managed to kill my alternate son while the merging was happening, or something. Not sure, because all my and every other Q's effort was going into keeping our Continuum separate from theirs.

Hmm. In retrospect that's actually not a funny story at all.)

* * *

_Notes: The reference to the alternate universe and the other version of Q's son is a reference to the Peter David novel "Q-Squared", which has been jossed by ST:Voyager's Q episodes. Footnotes: (*1) "Q & A" chp 30 "Trout", (*2) "Q & A" chp. 34 "Betrayal", (*3) "Q & A" chp 27 "Scary Stories", (*4) "Q & A" chp. 16 "Loss and Regret"_


	10. Kill or be killed

_Prompt: Would you ever kill a human being (or if you are not human - would you ever kill a being from your own species?)_

**There was a time when no one Q could kill another Q... and I wish it had stayed that way.**

There was a time when it was, essentially, impossible for one Q to kill another Q. It's a question of leverage; you can't pry someone out of a matrix that you yourself are equally embedded in. We were equals in power, equals (theoretically) in the Continuum, and to harm another Q was literally to harm oneself. It was possible to _hurt_ another Q, pretty badly, if you didn't mind taking significant damage yourself, but before you could actually kill another Q you'd have done so much damage to yourself that it would paralyze you.

Trust me, I was grateful for this - especially as a Q that on more than one occasion other Q were inspired to do violence to. There was a time, once, that a former best friend (*1) turned on me and ripped me to shreds; it took me 40 years to heal the damage and I wasn't quite sane for a while, but although I did nothing to fight back - the attack was so sudden and from someone I trusted, I didn't realize I needed to fight back until I was too disabled to do it - she damaged herself pretty badly in the process. On occasion, individual Q have attempted to... how to put this... _devour_ me, absorb me into themselves. This would have been an incredibly stupid idea on their part even if I hadn't been so good at fighting off such attacks, because if they'd succeeded, they would have ended up more me than them; in the kind of Q combat where we try to eat each other, we end up with the traits of the other, and sometimes the personality, inside us, and the stronger the personality the more likely that it will survive even if devoured, and perhaps overwrite the weaker personality of the winner. I have a _very_ strong personality. On another occasion, (**1) five Q ganged up on me and tried to forcibly overwrite my personality because they didn't like me and thought I needed to be someone different. Humans wouldn't think of this as murder because in humans, the body is interpreted to be the self, not the mind, but from the Q perspective this is kind of like raping and murdering someone and then making them an undead zombie; there's something running around that used to be you, but it's not you anymore. Five Q might have had a little more luck pulling a stunt like this than one Q, but... let's just say, I did have friends at the time and they didn't take kindly to such a thing.

The Q can also destroy each other by ganging up on one another, if the numbers are sufficient. If five or six Q can hate another Q with all their heart and soul, with no empathy and nothing in them but rage and hate, they can more or less burn the other Q to death, or at least that would be the closest human equivalent. This is normally quite impossible because the Continuum ensures that we all feel what each other feels and we can't avoid empathy, but it has been known to happen even before the war. What's much more common is that if one Q is creating such problems - so much ill feeling that people _want_ to hate him to death, even if they can't, quite - that it threatens to create a break, or discontinuity, in the Continuum, then a majority of the Continuum can simply declare that (*2) that person is not a Q anymore. So long, you're voted off the island, buh-bye and don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. This effectively kills the Q who was just thrown out of the Continuum because without the Continuum, we are mortal. (It's more complicated than that. We're made of Continuum. Without the Continuum we literally don't exist. To exist in a different universe, we must translate ourselves into matter or energy, and when we sever a Q from the Continuum, we force them to translate into matter and then sever the link to the Continuum that would let them draw power or translate back. This invariably produces a being that needs to draw on finite sources of energy to survive, which means they are subject to entropy, which means sooner or later they'll die.)

So those were the ways a Q could kill another Q - always in concert with many fellow Q who agree, always with forethought (without forethought, you'd end up in a situation like my friend did, where you hurt yourself almost as badly as you hurt your target), and therefore, we _couldn't_ simply murder each other. Causing the death of another Q was always an execution, carried out by the state, the Continuum... or if it was a lynch mob it was sanctioned by the Continuum, because the victim couldn't be a victim if they had any redeeming features whatsoever. So I always felt quite superior to lesser, mortal races where they kill each other all the time, because my species, as loud and vitriolic as our arguments with one another could get, simply did _not_ kill each other. Mostly because we couldn't, but I didn't think about it that way.

And then we had a civil war.

One of our number had (*3) agitated for the (*4) right to die, and when we were pressured (by my misjudgment, mostly) to give it to him, it terrified us. Some of us, like me, saw our own future in his death; we saw the mind-numbing boredom he suffered from, and we feared that if the Continuum didn't change, didn't become interesting again, all of us would end up like him... bored to death and wanting to die. Others saw his death as a change itself, and feared that change would in itself destroy the Continuum. We saw his death as a symptom of what was killing us all; they saw his death as the problem itself, because they weren't bored yet. And it proved to be impossible to reconcile our perspectives.

They tried to throw us out, and found, much to their chagrin, that there wasn't enough of them. Though they outnumbered us, it wasn't by a high enough percentage that they could get the leverage to sever us from the Continuum. In fact it was as if the Continuum itself was splitting in half. And that split was why we didn't know that an idiot had created a gun that could kill other Q.

See, he was on the side of stasis, of order and the rule of law. He was in fact one of the pioneers who created the Continuum, one of the serious oldsters. And he made a horrible mistake. He created a weapon so terrible that surely it would prevent war, because of course everyone would have to think it too terrible to ever use. If he'd spent more time studying mortals he'd have known it doesn't work that way. He pulled a gun at the meeting where we were trying, and failing, to reconcile, attempting to use it to blackmail our side into standing down. Of course, I knew the guy, and I knew that killing another Q was anathema to him, so I knew he wasn't going to shoot. So we were talking, negotiating, and I was calling his bluff and arguing that bringing guns to the Continuum wasn't exactly the best way to preserve the status quo... and one of the aforementioned Q on their side who really, really hates my guts copied the gun and tried to kill me.

All Q know everything all other Q know. Except right before and during the war, when the Continuum had split in half and the discontinuity prevented us from knowing the minds of the other side or being forced to feel empathy with them. So Ol' Grandad had created the gun, never intending to use it, but everyone who was on the side of order instantly knew how he made it and how to make one for themselves, and a lot of them were on that side because they really couldn't stand me and I was our side's main proponent and spokesQ. One of them made his own copy of the gun and shot at me, and a guy who really didn't even like me that much but believed strongly in the things I stood for shoved me out of the way, and he was killed instead. Butchered, his energies - our flesh and blood, in human terms - covering me and the others on our side.

I cannot describe the rage I felt. I can't even remember it clearly. Because I don't want to. Just like I don't want to clearly remember going insane with loneliness and anger at being betrayed. But... remember when I said that the Q can hate each other to death? I and a few others on my side killed the gunman, burned him alive, because our friend and comrade had been murdered, the only Q _ever_ to be outright murdered by one other Q (yet), and we could feel nothing but hate and the need for vengeance.

The other side started shooting at us, and as much as this fueled our rage and hate, it also terrorized many of us into fleeing. See, we didn't have the weapon. Many Q can hate one Q to death, but one Q can kill a whole bunch of other Q with the weapon... and because it was invented on their side we couldn't sense how to make it. We tried to shield from it, but we would have all died there if Amanda, (*5)(**2) the Q child raised among humans, hadn't left the side of law and order and come over to us with the blueprints for the weapon in her mind.

And the moment she planted it on me, I wanted to use it. I _wanted_ them all dead, I wanted to see them explode and their energies cover the landscape. I don't know how many of them I shot before cooler minds prevailed and dragged me off because we had lost enough people to make it worth retreating and regrouping. Two, three? I didn't care. I didn't care that I was murdering my own kind, I didn't care that I was committing an act so anathema to the Q we had designed the Continuum in the first place to make it impossible. I wanted them dead.

It wasn't until after we retreated and I had time to cool down, to stop being _quite_ so enraged, that I realized what I had done. Entities I had played with as an adolescent, that I had exchanged pleasure with, entities I had known for five billion years, entities who were never supposed to die, were dead. At my hands. They had been power and fire and energy incarnate, they had been gods, and then I broke them and now all they were was dissipating rivers of energy dissolving back into the Continuum, mindless, bodiless, gone.

Humans can cry, or throw up, or have nightmares when they do things like this. The Q don't have tears in our true form, we don't ingest food, and we don't sleep. But I'm pretty sure that if I had been human I would have done all of those things. Because when it comes down to it, I really don't care how many mortals die because mortals are supposed to die and they're not what I am anyway, but I am not nearly as tough when it comes to the death of other Q. (**3) And I don't think I'd want to be. I can't imagine a Q who is not devastated by the death of other Q unless they're a sociopath, or raised by humans. (Amanda, despite being our weakest, was actually our most effective fighter, because she _didn't_ care. These weren't her family and friends of five billion years, they were the people who killed her parents. Technically _most_ of us had voted with the majority to kill her parents, but she was able to ignore that fact and just put it all on our opponents, which says something about how human she is where it counts. But Amanda's not a sociopath; she was just raised by mortals. Different moral system. Inferior, but not absent entirely.)

I had to keep killing because now it was war. You don't know how many times I wanted to give up - we were fighting for such a stupid reason. I mean, the argument, the disagreement that had led to this, was not stupid, and in fact I was willing to die for my beliefs, or kill for them. But the fact that it had come to killing at all was so incredibly idiotic. Surely they wanted to quit too. Surely we could resolve this somehow. But they were just as afraid of losing as we were. So the killing had to go on. And it was going to go on until either one entire side was dead or we found some way to persuade them, or to persuade the rest of the Continuum, the majority that hadn't taken sides.

I think, maybe, we could have killed them all. I'm almost positive of it. We had flexibility and experience with war (we tended to be the ones that studied mortals, and mortals have wars all the time), and we weren't outnumbered _that_ badly. But I didn't want to win that way. I didn't want to have the deaths of so many Q on my conscience. I agonized and planned and plotted and finally I came up with an idea to try to persuade them; death is change, but so is life. So is birth. (**4) Perhaps by having a child, by bringing procreation to the Continuum, I could convince at least my undecided brethren, if not the ones actually trying to kill us, that change could mean life as well as death.

So to answer the question: would I ever kill a member of my species? Yes, I would, and I have, when I felt the cause was sufficient. And if I believed in any power greater than the Continuum I would pray fervently to it that I never, ever, ever have to do that again.

* * *

_Footnotes to Q&A entries: (*1) "Q & A" chp 30 "Trout", (*2) "Q & A" chp 27 "Scary Stories", (*3) "Q & A" chp. 12 "On the nature of Mu", (*4) "Heee's Back" chp 7 "Letters I will never send", (*5) "Q & A" chp. 42 "Motherhood is highly overrated"_

_Footnotes to other stories: (**1) "Snapshots from Eternity" chp. 4 "Scared", (**2) "Amanda Goes To War", (**3) "The Night The Day The War Began", (**4) "Snapshots from Eternity" chp. 3 "I want for a child"_


	11. Books, and the future

_Prompt: A friend asks you to recommend a book: which book would you choose and why?_

That would really depend on the friend, now wouldn't it? I'm not exactly going to recommend one of those Cardassian twenty-seven book epics about a life of service to the state to Jean-Luc, for example.

Actually, I wouldn't recommend one of those to _anyone._ I can read an entire book in a nanosecond, and I still resent the loss of those 27 nanoseconds I spent reading one of those things.

You know what book I'm inordinately fond of, that I would recommend to anyone who wants to understand what it is I like about humans? _Voyage of the Dawn Treader_ by C. S. Lewis. Normally I have very little interest in Lewis, since most of his work is an elaborate fantasy about how humans get to live forever and the cosmic entities responsible for the universe's creation actually personally care for human beings and would even willingly die for one. Okay, I've been in a situation where (*1) I more-or-less willingly offered up my life for a bunch of humans, and I'm a cosmic entity, but I'm not responsible for the universe's creation (I've made a planet or two, but if I were responsible for the entire universe, it would be a _much_ more entertaining place), and besides, I was a mere human myself at the time. The idea that something vast enough to encompass the creation of the universe would actually personally concern itself with individual humans is... well, it's quaint, and amusing, the way it's amusing when small children think the entire universe revolves around their lives.

But in any case. _Voyage of the Dawn Treader_ manages to overcome this problem because it's not _about_ the fantasy of immortality and benevolent gods. It's about the need humans have - as personified by a talking mouse in the story, but hey - to explore to the edges of what they can survive and beyond, their need to push themselves to learn everything there is to know. That need resonates powerfully with me, since I was (*2) created in order to learn everything there is to know (and then I learned it, and life has sucked ever since.)

**The future's not all it's cracked up to be**

_Prompt: If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about any one thing you wished ~ concerning yourself, your life, the future, or anything else ~ what would you want to know?_

Nothing.

There _are_ things I could find out about my future, if I wanted to. I don't want to know. If there's no excitement, no possibility of surprise in my future whatsoever, then I'll be bored out of my mind, and when you're eternal, self-preservation demands you avoid boredom as much as possible.

_Prompt: Where do you see yourself in twenty years?_

I try very hard not to, actually. I mean, on a guess, twenty years from now I'll be more or less doing exactly what I'm doing now, because I live on the timescale of the Q and twenty years is not a whole lot of time. But I don't actually want to seriously think about what I'll be doing in the future, because I might actually figure it out and that would ruin the suspense.

Take one moment at a time, that's generally my motto.

_Prompt: Name three things that you're looking forward to in the near future and why._

No.

I don't look forward to things. I have hopes, fantasies, dreams, same as the next guy (well, not literally dreams, since I don't sleep, but I'm using it metaphorically.) But there is nothing I am certain will happen except for the dark inevitabilities of entropy. So there is nothing to look "forward" to, nothing that is certain in the future except death and destruction and the end of everything. Since that's really quite depressing, when I think of the future I think of the things I would _like_ to have happen, and the things I might do to _make_ those things happen, but there is nothing I want to think about that I am certain enough of it happening to be worth looking forward to as opposed to hoping for.

Now, if you wanted to know three things I _hope_ for or three things I'm trying to achieve, that'd be different, but that's not what you asked, so there.

* * *

_Footnotes: (*1) "Q & A" chp 27 "Scary Stories", (*2) "Q & A" chp. 32 "Ineffable, glorious and BORING"_


	12. Everything passes

_Prompt: "Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live." Haruki Murakami._

I would say that this is mostly accurate whether you're mortal or immortal.

Everything in the universe is finite. Stars burn out, planets blow up, species evolve or die out. Mortals can possess something that lasts longer than they do, only because they themselves are so short-lived and fragile. Immortals, however, watch everything that isn't themselves or their fellows collapse or fade to dust.

And you cannot "have" another immortal. You can have a relationship with them, but that too changes over time. Aeons pass, and lovers become enemies, or worse, the bonds between you fade into indifference. Others that you were indifferent to once become your new friends or your new loves. No relationship stays the same.

It may not even be accurate to say that if you are immortal you have yourself forever. Who _you_ are changes as well. And the act of not changing is itself a kind of death, so if you managed to have everything for eternity the _meaning_, the value of it would decrease to nothing, leaving you with effectively nothing even though none of it actually died or was lost.

It rather surprises me that a mortal came up with this quote, actually. Plenty of mortals have lived their entire existences in the same building, in the same town, surrounded by mostly the same people, with largely the same possessions. They get away with it because they die, but for any of us, mortal or immortal, a lifetime is all you get. Eternity is meaningless if you yourself aren't around to see it; all the time that is important to the individual is the time we are alive. So mortals _do_ get to have things for "keeps", if by that you mean they get to keep them their whole lives, or even their whole lives and the whole lives of all the younger people they know. Of course, mortals who get to do such things usually live lives constrained horribly by hidebound traditions and stultifying stagnation; mortals with _interesting_ lives rarely get to keep anything their entire life.


	13. Binary thinking isn't thinking

_Prompt: Black and white._

What's wrong with purple?

Or red. I'm actually quite fond of red.

_Prompt: What makes someone a hero? What makes someone a villain?_

The label on the action figure, mostly.

**Binary thinking in a tetradimensional world is... well... FLAT. Duh.**

No, seriously. These questions are meaningless. What is a hero or a villain? I have been called a demon for forcing the population of a world to save themselves from a supernova. I have been called a god for showing up and doing some entertaining party tricks. If the difference between a demon and a god is so ridiculously hard to find, how are you supposed to define the difference between a hero and a villain?

There is no black and white, no good and evil, no hero and villain, because these are all binaries, and we don't actually live in a binary universe. No, really. Just because those pixels on your screen are ones and zeroes doesn't mean the entire universe works like that. There's on, off, all of the range between on and off, and "doesn't have a switch", as well as "won't answer the question" and "the question is stupid". Mathematically this is how the universe works:

1  
0  
.00017  
NULL  
Unknown  
Mu

Mu, as you may recall from (*1) the last time I talked about it, is Terran Japanese for "your question is too stupid to be answered." The classic "mu" questions contradict themselves obviously, such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Since a clap requires two hands, the contradiction is obvious. But "When did you stop beating your wife?" "Why are you such an asshole?" and "What makes a person a hero or a villain?" all fall in the category of questions that make an assumption and bake it into the question so there's actually no way to answer correctly except to say "Your question makes no sense." I never _started_ beating my wife, therefore I cannot have stopped. (Technically, in fact, I never had a wife. We call each other _companions_, not spouses.) "Why are you such an asshole" assumes that I _am_ an asshole. Well, okay, in fact this question is perfectly accurate when applied to me, because I am (*2) actually an asshole, but the point is, the question isn't asking "Are you an asshole", it assumes you are and moves on to why. So if you aren't, there is no way to answer it.

"What makes a person a hero?" assumes there is such a thing as a hero. What _is_ a hero? The ancient Greeks thought it was a person who performed great deeds, and "great" was defined as "above ordinary human level", so a person who raped, murdered and sulked in his tent a lot was considered a hero because he was invulnerable and pretty much unstoppable in war. The 20th century Americans thought a hero was a guy who played sports really well, _or_, a guy who went to foreign countries to shoot at other people for no particularly good reason except he'd been told to. If you save the universe, and your species, and your entire ship, you're a big damn hero. But what if in order to save the universe you have to knowingly sacrifice an innocent person? Two? Three? what if they're kids? What if they cry and beg you to save them, but you throw them out the airlock anyway, because the alternative is someone eats your entire ship? Then are you a hero?

"Villain" is even worse. Are you a villain if you are defending your hometown against invaders who came in, started dropping bombs for no reason, and who rape and murder 14 year old girls? Well, in the eyes of the invaders you might very well be. Are you a villain if you routinely beat your child senseless? If you belong to a species that thinks child abuse is an A-OK way to toughen them up to be Strong Warriors as adults, then no, apparently you're not. The Cardassians are never villains because every single damn one of them has an excellent rationale for why he or she did what he or she did for the Good Of Cardassia, and never mind that they all contradict each other. _I'm_ a villain. Except when I'm a hero. Depending on who you listen to, and if you're talking to members of the Q Continuum, depending on what I've done this week and how they feel about it.

I don't like binary thinking. It's an oxymoron. The moment you go binary, _you are no longer thinking._ You are computing, and you can't compute the universe. I don't like the idea that "black or white?" is a question that can possibly make sense outside of the context of "I have only one kind of ink, what color should I make the picture and what color should the background be?" I mean, whatever happened to green? Purple? Chartreuse? Lemon yellow? Salmon pink? Burnt sienna? Ultraviolet? How can "black or white" be a question? It assumes those are the only two choices, and even beings that can only see in on/off see more colors than _that_, because grey exists.

* * *

_Footnote: (*1) "Q & A" chp 12 "On the nature of Mu", "Q & A" chp. 41 "Perception"_


	14. Question pile

A pile of old questions this time.

_Prompt: Seduction. Have you ever seduced someone or has anyone ever seduced you?_

That depends on your terms.

I tend to think humans use the term "seduction" to mean "persuade someone to have sex with you when they would otherwise not be inclined to do it." And I confess, most of the time I don't see the point to doing this. Sex is fun and all, but it's hardly the be-all and end-all of existence that mortals make it into. I don't usually allow myself to have a sexual interest in a mortal (being that sexual interest is entirely a matter of mortal, meat bodies with hormones and all that jazz, whether or not I allow the body I'm wearing to feel such a thing is entirely under my control) unless I already know for a fact that they are interested in me.

Occasionally I've persuaded someone who wanted me into sex that for some stupid social reason having to do with the mores of their culture they didn't think was a good idea. That can be highly entertaining. But I don't bother to work on persuading people who don't actually want me (with one exception, and that didn't work.)

Now, in the sense of "persuade people to do _anything_ they would be inclined not to do otherwise", yes, of course, I seduce people all the time. I'm a trickster, a tester - the process of talking people into doing what they _want_ to do deep inside but think they shouldn't do is my life's work (well, one aspect of it anyway.) If I can corrupt you into violating your morals, then either you weren't a very moral person to begin with or there's something seriously wrong with the morals your society believes in, or possibly both. And occasionally I do this with sex but it's just as much fun to make people start wars for stupid reasons, sell out their friends, lie to the people that elected them, or any number of other things I can talk people into doing.

_Prompt: What does respect mean to you?_

An interesting question. To me, respect contains both the premise that one should be appropriately wary of my power, _and_ that one should consider me a thinking, feeling entity with ideas of my own. I am not your god, a slavish projection of your own superego for you to pretend to worship while using my name to aggrandize your own power or make yourself look better; I am not your demon, spending my existence looking for ways to torment you or make you do terrible things so as to damn your soul. I don't care about your soul, actually. I do what _I_ want to do, for _my_ reasons, that do not revolve around _you._ You'd think this would not be so hard for mortals to comprehend regarding omnipotent entities, but actually they have an amazingly hard time with it. As for my own kind, treating me with respect means that while you can recognize I have a reputation as a jokester, occasionally I _am_ serious, and paying attention to me when I'm serious might be a good idea.

_Prompt: If you could read my mind __right now__... Talk about a conversation when what you said was not what you were thinking._

**You can tell I don't mean what I say because my mouth is moving.**

All of them.

In the Continuum there are multiple levels of mental communication, and only the surface, most superficial level translates to mortal speech. The other levels may be more akin to body language, or at the deepest levels simply empathy. In order to keep from flowing into each other, being devoured by one another into an overmind, we need to use communication to hold ourselves apart as much as to bring us together, so we tend to use the surface to say things that have a modicum of truth, perhaps, but hardly reflect the full truth of what we think or how we feel. Other Q generally understand the purpose to this, but most mortals tend to think I lie a lot because the things I say with my mouth aren't, shall we say, necessarily representative of the truth. Those who know me well, though, learn to understand me. I'm not trying to _deceive_ when I say things that are exaggerations or just plain not true; I'm simply avoiding being unpleasantly blunt.

_Prompt: If you could get anyone drunk, who would it be and what would you do?_

I wouldn't bother. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel; getting someone drunk is entirely too cheap and easy a method of getting them to do things they wouldn't have chosen otherwise, and it lets them off the hook. If I'm going to get you to do something that you believe you shouldn't do, I'm going to make damn sure you do it when you're stone cold sober and can't excuse yourself later on with "Oh, Q got me drunk, so it wasn't my fault!" Oh no. You'll know it was your own choice for the rest of your life.

Now, I might choose to be present when someone has freely chosen to be drunk for their own reasons; when they know I exist and can instantly be anywhere I choose to be, and they choose to get drunk anyway, they should certainly expect that I might possibly show up when they're drunk. But the most I might try to get someone to do is admit to things they won't confess to when they're sober, things that they won't be able to deny the truth of when they sober up but that they'd never have admitted if they weren't drunk. _Getting_ someone drunk for such a purpose, however, is cheating.


	15. Ya gotta be cruel to be kind

_Prompt 232: Is there a situation where it's appropriate to be unkind?_

How about all of them?

My perspective on this is probably somewhat different from most beings. As a member of the Q Continuum, the greatest dangers I face on a regular basis aren't death, pain, hunger or loss; I am at greatest risk of being (*1) bored out of (*2) my mind or (*3) swallowed by the overmind I live within. I don't, generally, have to wonder if people love me or care about me. They can't help it, any more than I can help caring about them even though there are (*4) times I really wish I could hate them all. I don't need to feel like I belong; I already belong (*5) a lot more than I wish I did.

If the Q are too open with each other, too connected, too gentle, too selfless, too _kind_ as you put it... we can be destroyed. Melt into the Continuum overmind, merge into one another and create a new entity. I had a (*6) friend who tried to die that way for billions of years, and it was my job to be cruel to her so she wouldn't try to merge with me and wouldn't be able to merge with anyone else... well, at least until she (*7) snapped and tried to kill me.

We also run the danger, when we deal with mortals, that they will end up (*8) worshipping us. Which I find rather repulsive, personally, but which is also actively dangerous to the mortals in question... because we're _not_ totally obsessed with their well-being, and if they spend their time praying to us instead of actually solving their own problems, then we're either stuck fixing things for them for the rest of time, or we'll get bored and abandon them and _then_ they'll be screwed. It is much, much better to be mean to mortals when you have godlike power... at least until they can prove to you that no, they're not going to throw themselves at your feet and start worshipping just because you give them a (*9) nice present.

So I am, generally, very much in favor of being unkind to people when they need it, and sometimes just when _I_ need it... hey, an entity's gotta find some fun _somewhere._

* * *

_Footnotes: (*1) "Q & A" chp 48 "The weight of history or something", (*2) "Q & A" chp 32 "Ineffable, glorious, and BORING", (*3) "Q & A" chp 37 "Heavy is the burden of being me", (*4) chp. 44 "Comfort and the Lack Thereof", (*5) "Q & A" chp 10 "Talk about politics!", (*6) "Heee's Back" chp. 9 "Bestest Pals", (*7) "Q & A" chp 30 "Trout", (*8) "Heee's Back" chp. 5 "Religion", (*9) "Q & A" chp. 39 "Question Bucket Strikes Back" _


	16. Oh, gimme a head with hair, or don't

_Prompt: Hair._

What is it with humans and hair?

It grows all over their bodies, but when it's visible anywhere other than the top of their heads (or on their eyelids), they shave it, they pluck it, they wax it, anything to get rid of it or minimize it. But if they lose it from the top of their heads, suddenly it's a disaster! Even Picard, who is one of the few humans I've met who's totally comfortable being who he is, went through months of mourning for his hair when he lost it very young... but his precious Federation absolutely has the technology to restore it, and he never bothered to. It upset him to go bald but it upset him more to admit that going bald had upset him, and fixing his hair would have proven that he actually cared about being bald. Except that he _did_ actually care.

WHY?

If something bothers you and you have the power to fix it, _do_ it! Don't pretend it doesn't bother you if it does! I know, I know, he'd totally have lost "I am completely comfortable with my own body" points by admitting there was something about himself he wanted to fix. But he did, in fact, want to fix it, so why lie?

At least by the time I met him he really _was_ used to it. Which I appreciate. I think the bald look is actually quite aesthetically pleasing on him. Others, it doesn't work so well for. Did Benjamin Sisko have _any_ good reason for shaving his head other than trying to tell the Cardassians that he was a total badass, and did he really think it would work?

And if Kathryn Janeway wants to have long hair why doesn't she just let it be long? She has to put it up in a bun every time she leaves her quarters. What's the _point?_ Grow it long or grow it short, but why grow it long and then tie it up to be short?

And don't get me started on facial hair. Ugh! It looks disgusting on nearly every human I've seen it on. I almost thought William Riker had potential, once; even granted him the powers of the Q. But then he grew a beard, and now I'm grateful he turned me down. Talk about dodging a bullet! Any being who actually thinks that rug on his face makes him more attractive does _not_ belong in the Q Continuum.

No, of all the things that puzzle me about humans, I think their own attitudes toward their hair is one of the most trivial and yet the most puzzling. It's _fur._ Every mammal on your planet grows it. Why do you make such a huge thing about it?


	17. Utopia doesn't mean what you think

_Prompt 234: Utopia. Prompt 235: Show us where you live._

I find it a trifle ironic that these two questions were so close to one another.

**Eutopia is Utopia; the perfect place is nowhere**

Some would say that where I live _is_ a Utopia. Certainly those that dwell in the Q Continuum are free from any material want - we have no hunger, no poverty, no disease or injury or even old age. It'd be a lie to say we have no war, but we've only had one in a few billion years, which is better than nearly any other sentient species can boast. We can only die if our fellows kill us, and even that is very, very rare. Many, many beings would have called our existence utter perfection, a Utopia in truth.

But see, that comes from a basic misunderstanding of the word "Utopia." It's a pun, you see. "Eutopia", which would be pronounced the same way, means "good place", a place of perfection. But "utopia", spelled with just the u, means "noplace."

There is no such thing as Utopia, by definition, because it means both "perfect place" and "nowhere." Which is more insight than I'd have expected of a human, frankly, and so I'm intrigued that one of them came up with the word.

You see, we of the Continuum were created to seek power and knowledge, to strive to better ourselves, to push ourselves to become gods. And we did. And that is our problem. What can you do with your existence, when you've already achieved the purpose you were born for, and there's nothing left to do but mark time until the end of eternity?

I don't want to die - as dull as I often find my life, it's still my life, and I still enjoy bits and pieces of it enough to make the concept of nothingness utterly unappealing. But I do need to sift through truly horrendous amounts of chaff to find the wheat that makes my bread of life, if you'll forgive me for taking a metaphor much too far. _Most_ of my existence nowadays is mind-numbingly dull. And this is true for many in the Continuum - one of our number even fought for the right to kill himself because life as a Q was just too damn boring, which was how the aforementioned war got started.

And I wonder sometimes, would I be happier if I had been created as a being that can die?

Most mortals have horrendous existences, described well by the Terran philosopher Thomas Hobbes as "nasty, brutish and short." If the diseases and the injuries and the starvation don't get them, the dire poverty does. Or the expectations of their fellows press upon them and prevent them from ever being free in all their brief existence. Or they're too ignorant even to imagine freedom. I don't envy mortals who have such lives, no.

But I think about mortals such as my personal favorite, the human starship captain Jean-Luc Picard. Mortals who live in an era where they've conquered most disease, most injury, most material want. Capable of feeling hunger, but able to go satisfy it with ten ice cream sundaes any time they want to. Permitted by their society to freely do _most_ of what they might want to, including explore the limitless boundaries of the parts of the universe they can actually get to in their tiny little lifespans.

Say I'd lived for two billion years and then died of old age. I would have had a happy life, and a brief period of pain at the end, and then nothingness. Would that have been better, I wonder, than a happy two billion years followed by three billion of increasing boredom and desperation, slowly watching as my reason for existing becomes harder and harder to continue to achieve? I almost have to live vicariously through mortals nowadays, because I exist to explore and to learn what's new and there ISN'T ANYTHING. Nowhere to explore, nothing new to learn. It's more fun to watch mortals learn new things and see their little eyes light up with the joy I can't feel anymore than it is to spend a thousand years in the pursuit of two minutes of the feeling that I've just done something I hadn't managed to do before.

I can't give up what I've learned or done; I can't choose to be _less_ than what I am now. That violates everything I am and everything I believe in. But when you're at the top, and you can't go back down, where is left to go?

Eutopia, utopia. A place of perfection does not exist. Everyone's got their own problems, because the universe is finite. Either you die, or you reach your limits.


	18. Scary people

_Prompt: Discuss an individual who has scared you. _

No.

**Fine, fine. I won't be a coward about it, after all.**

A long time ago there was an (*1) incident in which a (*2) good friend of mine did something unpleasant to me, which... led me to do something even more unpleasant in return... and the Continuum was a trifle concerned with my sanity. They told me not to think about her, or the incident, at all. Which is possible, if you're a Q. I'm aware that for mortals this is essentially the swordfish dilemma (sit in a corner and don't think of a swordfish. Whoops! You thought of one just now, didn't you?), but since Q thoughts have an unpleasant habit of becoming reality, we actually do tell our fellows not to think of things, and it actually works.

Except when it doesn't.

Objective observers of my behavior told me that I was behaving in ways that the Continuum considered even more problematic than usual, and they suspected it was due to trauma related to the thing I wasn't allowed to think about. Now, we don't have therapists. In fact the entire Continuum runs on the fiction that no Q ever needs emotional support, ever. Since this isn't necessarily true, we would on occasion turn to mortals for the sympathy we weren't going to get at home. In particular we tended to go to a species called the El-Aurians, nicknamed Listeners, because they were in general uncannily good at listening to people's problems, hence the name.

It was suggested to me that I might avail myself of the services of a Listener. So I picked one. And we... didn't get along.

No, actually, I thought we were getting along just fine. She routinely told me that I was a force of chaos, that I should go away, and she didn't want to deal with me, but _every_ mortal tells me that. It's par for the course. I thought things were going swimmingly. She was, in my ill-informed opinion at the time, a fascinating creature in her own right - an Adept, with powers over time and fate that even the Q didn't fully understand - and so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone. Make some conversation, and also study this nifty power of hers. She didn't like that so much.

So she locked me out of the universe.

Have you ever been in a place where there is literally no time, because it is outside any temporal dimension? I have. The Q carry their own internal chronotons; we generate sufficient time for the purpose of continuing to have consciousness, whether there is time in the dimension we're in or not. But it is quite possible to go mad when you cannot lose consciousness and you are, literally, nowhere.

The above-mentioned incident with my friend had led to me being thrown into a pocket universe (where there _was_ time, just not anything else) by the Continuum, alone, so I could heal free of external influences. I... didn't do well with it. Which is why, in fact, the Continuum was questioning my sanity. When this _person_ locked me out of time and space and left me in nothingness, still able to think and feel but unable to do anything because there was nothing there _to_ do... for the dire crime of not leaving her be at the exact moments she wanted me gone, and being just a trifle more curious about her powers than she was comfortable with... You know, it was one thing when the Continuum did it, because even as badly damaged as I was when they did it I had some distant knowledge that this wasn't supposed to be banishment, that they would come and get me someday. I had no such knowledge this time.

The Continuum was actually forced to _negotiate_ with these creatures for my return... ransom me back, as it were. They agreed - and I was bound by it, because I'm part of the Continuum, even though I technically wasn't there when they worked out the treaty - that the Q would not interfere with the lives or possessions of the El-Aurians in any way without explicit permission. And then she brought me back. I was, um, having a slight bit of a panic attack, given that I had no idea that I would ever be allowed back in to the universe, and not only did the entire Continuum see it, which is kind of like your older brothers and sisters seeing you cry even though you feel that you are certainly old enough not to act like a baby around them anymore... but _she_ saw it. And smirked.

I have a healthy respect for/fear of the entire Continuum, given that my life literally (*3) belongs to them, and I was quite reasonably concerned about the Calamarain when they were trying to kill me (*4) the day I was mortal, and I had a few moments of fear during the (*5) war... but I have never been frightened of a _mortal_ before the way this person treated me.

I got her back, of course. Turns out her entire species was on the Borg's hit list. And, you know, we possibly could have saved them if they hadn't made us sign that treaty... but non-interference is non-interference. I got her to directly refuse me permission to save her world, and now she has to live with that. I'd still be giving her a wide berth, though, if it weren't for the fact that for some inexplicable reason she's a close friend of my favorite human, which means every so often I can't avoid running into her.

* * *

_Footnotes: (*1) "Q & A" chp 30 "Trout", (*2) "Heee's Back" chp 9 "Bestest Pals", (*3) "Q & A" chp. 25 "Everything and Nothing", (*4) "Q & A" chp. 27 "Scary Stories", (*5) "Heee's Back" chp. 10 "Kill or be killed"_


	19. Let the games begin

_Prompt: If you could be in the Olympics (summer or winter), what event/sport would you want to do most? Why?_

You know, it is sometimes _really really hard_ for me not to snort in disgust and throw my metaphorical hands in the air at these questions. The _Olympics?_ A contest of physical prowess, held on Earth for about 200 years, with solely human contestants? Am I supposed to care about such things?

*sigh* But, I am _trying_, very hard, to come up with answers to questions that seem completely ridiculous and have absolutely no connection to my existence, which frequently involves answering the spirit of the question if not the way it was actually phrased. So I'll tell you a story about a contest I participated in, which actually _involved_ tests of physical prowess between humans and other humanoid sentients similar to Earth's Olympics, though I myself obviously didn't actively take part in those tests.

**Games are the mark of sentience.**

We in the Q Continuum can't actually conduct games of physical prowess against each other. We're all equally nigh omnipotent. If we were actually to contest our powers against each other directly we could cause incredible damage to space-time should we go all-out, and we're close enough to equal in power that it would take going all-out to actually uncover any differences between us. But that isn't to say we don't play games against each other. The ability to play is one of the fundamental differences between sentient beings and non-sentient ones, and when you're bored, games and contests and challenges can fill the time and give you some excitement, whether you're playing or standing on the sidelines betting on the result.

So we have contests with each other all the time. And in fact we conduct our politics that way. Frequently, when two Q are opposed to one another and neither will back down, the issue is resolved with a duel - a contest of some sort, where the winner gets the loser's political support in the Continuum for whatever it is they can't agree on.

Now, I had been arguing for some time that humans were sentient and the Continuum should either declare them such, or let me set them a final exam to pass that would get them declared as such. Other Q disagreed. Some, quite vehemently. There had actually been a prophecy (well, it wasn't a prophecy so much as a visiting Q from the future who couldn't keep his mouth shut when conversing with one of us) that humans would irrevocably change the Continuum. Me, I thought the prophecy had been fulfilled by the birth of Amanda Rogers, the first new child born to the Continuum in aeons, who had been born in a human form and raised by humans as a human. So I wasn't worried about it. Other Q, however, continued to be concerned that if humans were declared sentient it would cause some sort of horrific transformation to the Continuum, somehow.

The most vehement opponent of my position was a Q who is the Goddess of a particularly nasty race of xenophobic muscle-bound cannibals. In her opinion, might literally made right, physical strength, endurance and ability to commit violence are the traits that make a species _morally_ worthy to overcome other species, and she hated humans because humans, a physically feeble species that were hardly the brightest of beings, had managed to very quickly achieve dominance over more than half of the Alpha Quadrant by making friends, schmoozing with other species, creating a framework for cultural exchange and promoting peace. _Really_ got her goat. It didn't help that she thought I'd betrayed her; she was one of the ones who arranged for me to be sent to test humanity in the first place, because I was angry at humans for what had happened to Amanda's parents, and because I sort of had a rep at the time. For... some time... since some unpleasant things had happened to me... I'd been... well, shall we say, most species I tested didn't pass. So they all thought they'd send me out to be their bully boy and assassin and make sure humanity got kicked to the curb, and instead humans passed my test and I promptly fell in love with the species. For this reason, this Q was obstinately refusing to allow me to conduct a final exam for humanity.

Why this mattered was that as long as a species is declared non-sentient by Q standards, the Q have the right to destroy it if it's seen as a threat to other species and especially if it's seen as a threat to the Q. With the prophecy of humans changing the Continuum hanging over humanity's head, and the number of Q who hated humans, I _needed_ humanity to be declared sentient to protect them from my fellow Q. So, since this conqueror goddess was standing in my way, I challenged her. A duel, to be carried out between my favorite humans (and their non-human allies; this was important, as I'll explain later) and her favorite species, the Mastragor.

We arranged for a third Q to provide judges and overseers for the competition. For fairness' sake, since Q can influence other Q, this judge set the contest to be on _his_ favorite world, overseen by his favorite species, a highly evolved, peaceful, and very very boring group of people who live in harmony with nature and gaze at their own navels and spend a lot of time studying history. This guy personally could not stand me, and I thought his favorite race was one of the most boring in existence, but I suggested him on the grounds that he'd be "fair" and Conqueror Goddess Q took the bait. For all the violence of her philosophies she was much better at schmoozing with other Q than I was, and she was friends with this guy, so she naturally thought he would lean toward ruling for her. But I had a master plan.

I scrolled through time until I found a point where the Enterprise (the one commanded by Jean-Luc Picard, of course) was trying to help a species resolve a conflict between their oppressive government and a nihilistic terrorist group. The terrorists had gotten hold of a sunkiller bomb - a weapon that causes stars to go nova. It was assumed that they didn't really want to use it, as it would destroy them as well. No one had any idea how desperate and nihilistic these people were. They set off their bomb, and the Enterprise tried, and failed, to catch the bomb before it hit the sun. It disappeared into the star's corona, and Picard had just enough time to stare at it and recognize his ship didn't even have time to go to warp before the sun blew up and devoured them, before I stopped time for him.

I made him, and later his shipmates, a deal. I told them I had a bet going with a fellow Q. (I didn't tell them the stakes. If they knew that I was actively supporting getting humanity declared sentient, it would screw with my ability to actually administer the final exam.) If they agreed to go with me and fight for my side in this contest, I promised that whether they won or lost, I would stop the sunkiller bomb. However, if _they_ wanted to survive, they had to win, because their opponents were cannibals who would eat the losers. (Sadly, I was not making this up.) They agreed. I made it clear to my fellow Q that although it was humanity I was specifically testing, I would include nonhuman friends and allies of humanity in my team, so I got everyone to agree that "humans" would win if non-humans acted on their behalf to make sure my team won the contest. Since everyone knew I always picked the Enterprise crew and they had several non-humans and a half-human among them, they allowed it. This was part of my master plan.

The contest itself was to be feats of physical skill and prowess, similar to Earth's Olympics. For the most part, her team kicked my team's ass. See, the Mastragor were _all_ physically huge - not outside the normal range for humanoids, but built like humanoid bodybuilders - and extremely strong, and genetically engineered, and culturally conditioned to consider failure at anything something that gets you killed, by your fellows if not directly by the consequences of the failure. Data and Worf held their own, but the actual humans, plus Troi, were defeated in increasingly humiliating ways. And when the other team won, they gloated, loudly and obnoxiously, about how they would, once the victory was granted to them, rape, kill and eat their opponents, not necessarily in that order, and how much superior they were, and how their Goddess would lead them to victory over all lesser species, and they would crush, maim, obliterate, etc.

The species conducting the test, the boring peaceful guys? They didn't like this so much.

They liked my humans. Because my humans are likable. That's humanity's incredible strength; they can make allies out of almost anyone. They liked Picard's speeches and the way my humans and their non-human friends worked together and the way they tried (but failed) to persuade their opponents not to be so vicious. They liked the way Picard's side actually showed concern for _them_, the boring judges, whereas the Mastragor were vicious and arrogant to the judges. So when the contest was more than half over and Picard's side was losing with less than a third of the total points, the judges created a new game, a final game that would count for two-thirds of all points, where the objective could not be realized without teamwork.

See, the Mastragor came from a society where failure wasn't tolerated, but backbiting and assassination were. They _couldn't_ work together. They were all, individually, glory hounds, all out for their own personal aggrandizement. My humans and their friends were _very_ good at working together as a close unit, combining the individual strengths of each person to create a working gestalt that was capable of far more than the sum of the parts. So my team beat the pants off the enemy team in the last contest, and because the judges liked my team better and had set it up this way on purpose, this earned them enough points to win by a healthy margin.

Q objected, claiming that the judges had cheated by creating a test that was designed to the strengths of my team. I pointed out that we had given Q free reign to judge the test and _he_ had handed the responsibility entirely over to his favorite species, giving them authority to run the contest as they saw fit; and moreover, both of the other Q involved in this contest had _specifically_ agreed that anything a non-human, non-Q should do to support the efforts of my team would be allowed. She protested that she had agreed to that because members of my team were not human, and didn't think that judges should count, but I demonstrated that she hadn't agreed to the statement "Q's team may consist of both humans and non-humans working together for humans to win", but the statement that "humans shall be permitted to win if their victory is due to non-humans working on their behalf for the benefit of their team," with nothing in it to specify that only members of the team could work for the benefit of the team. And, yes, I planned it that way.

So my team were allowed to return to their ship, believing they'd just undergone a pointless and dangerous ordeal for no better reason than my entertainment, and I won my contest, and the right to test humanity for sentience. (And then the Continuum came up with the stupidest test possible _and_ demanded that I destroy humanity if it failed, but that's another story.)

* * *

_Note: The plot of this story is adapted from an actual storyline that the Star Trek writers planned, according to an interview in __Cinefantastique__, where Q and another Q were to conduct a contest with each other that involved the Enterprise crew fighting a race of super-strong cannibals. Arnold Schwarzenegger was supposed to play the leader of the bad guys. The storyline was apparently dropped for being too complicated. I added the name of the species, the part about the terrorists with the sunkiller bomb, the resolution of the plot and the behind-the-scenes Continuum politics stuff._


	20. First memory

_Prompt: What's the first thing you remember?_

Existence.

I had been _not_, and then, in a moment, I was. And in the moment I came to be, I knew that I was a Q, and that the beings that surrounded me, watching me, their minds filled with joy and anticipation as I joined their number, were also Q. I knew that I was loved, and wanted, and created to serve a need in my creators.

Then they reached inside me and opened my eyes, and I saw the limitless dimensions of the universe, stretching out around me forever. I saw a vista with no horizon, filled with bright and shiny things for me to reach for, to touch and study. I saw the vague shape of time trailing backward behind me, the openness of time beckoning in front of me. And they spoke into my mind, and the words they said were "All of this is for you to explore."

And I was filled with a joy so profound it _hurts_ to remember it, to know that I will never experience that joy again. Because the universe was limitless, and all of it was for me to explore. I had the power and the freedom to reach out for everything in the vastness that I wanted to understand, the power and the freedom to learn _everything._ I knew, then, that I was alive, and that I would love being alive, and that everything I could possibly want was right in front of me for me to enjoy.

Obviously, that is not how it worked out. To be fair to my newborn self, though... that _was_ how I experienced my life for the first maybe two or three billion years. And then I _did_ get everything I wanted. The universe wasn't as limitless as I thought it was when I was created. Eventually I ran out of new things to learn.

Through the totality of the Continuum I can also remember things that happened when I hadn't yet been created, such as the creation of the Continuum and the birth of the universe. But this one is _my_ first memory, and I will treasure it for the rest of eternity.


	21. Happy endings are a contradiction

**Prompt: Happy endings.**

The essence of an ending is that something is done with. Kaput. Finis. As a result, the common mortal misconception that there can be a happy ending in a lifetime is almost absurdly misplaced.

There can be a happy ending to something that was awful to begin with. A happy ending to a struggle, for instance, or a war. A happy ending to a miserable childhood. A happy ending to an imprisonment. Perhaps even a happy ending to a bad relationship, if the participants can be mature about it (although most bad relationships are not noted for the maturity of the participants.)

But a happy ending to a life? Lives end in death. I know a fellow (*1) who thought death was his personal happy ending, but I continue to refuse to accept that.(*2) Death may be _acceptable_, but it is never _happy._ (At least not for the person who died. Some people deserve to have their graves danced on after they die.)

Given the choice between ending, and not ending, I generally think that _not_ ending is the happier of the two.

* * *

p._1. "Q & A" chp. 12, "On The Nature Of Mu"; 2. "Heee's BACK!" chp 7, "Letters I Will Never Send"_


	22. Negotiations

**Prompt: What are the five steps to a successful negotiation?**

1. Know your opponent. Know what they want and what they are likely to give. It does you no good to go into a negotiation with someone where you're prepared to give them something totally reasonable in exchange for your own totally reasonable request, but they are totally unreasonable and hate you so much they'd sabotage themselves to destroy you.

2. Start from a position of overwhelming force. If that isn't possible, pretend you have a position of overwhelming force. Or if it's pretty obvious that you don't, start from a position of overwhelming rightness, so that anyone who opposes your just and reasonable demands is an idiot. If you have any doubts about what you want, _don't start negotiation._ Or at least put them out of your head.

3. Demand vastly more than you expect to get. That gives you the room to be negotiated down to slightly more than you wanted in the first place.

4. Do whatever it takes to win. Lie, cheat, rig the game? All's fair in love and war, and if a negotiation isn't a war, it's certainly quite close.

5. Stand your ground. When they undercut you to weaken your position, stay even more firm. Often I see people trying to conciliate, to sweeten the deal, because they understand that their position is weak. That's exactly the wrong way to go about it. When you're weakest is when you most need to pretend your strength is incomparable.

If you don't think you can do these things, don't start. You won't win. Taking less than you meant to get is a blow to your self esteem that will make it harder for you to win the next one. If you can't win, don't play; that saves your strength for the ones you _can_ win.


	23. Spy vs Spy

**Prompt: Would you make a good spy? Why or why not?**

Briefly? No.

Firstly, among the Q, what one Q knows we all know. This really makes it quite impossible to spy on one another. And the one time I tried it, during the civil war when it was actually possible, I promptly got caught and put up against a tree to be shot. (Well, it wasn't really a tree. It was really a localized hard disruption of Continuum-space such that it would block approach from about half the possible angles. But I digress.) Among my fellow Q, I am... not stealthy. I am loud, vivid, imposing, the center of attention wherever I go, and James Bond fantasies to the contrary, this does not make for a good spy. At _best_, I could be the guy that distracts everyone so the real spy can get in and get the information. (I'd say I could also be the guy who makes the nifty gadgets, but jokes about my name are _so_ overdone.)

Besides, my role within the Q, the functions I was born for, don't suit the life of a spy at all. I ask the questions... I don't ferret out the answers, and then keep them secret. I investigate and study mortal species, I explore and bring the bounty of knowledge home to my fellows to analyze, I conduct tests and experiments. I could be, in mortal terms, an explorer, a scientist, a detective, a prosecuting attorney, a judge, an anthropologist, a psychologist... and among my own kind, an activist, a rabble-rouser, an anarchist, a philosopher, an opposition leader... but spy? No.

Outside the Q, among mortals, I know everything, but I can't be bothered to share it with them. I'd really need to take sides in a mortal conflict quite egregiously to be bothered spying for them. I mean, sure, I might tell Picard where the cloaked Dominion warships that are planning to blow up his species' shipyards are... _once._ If he asked nicely. But if I was going to tell him everything he needed to win a war, why wouldn't I just go so far as to blink his enemies out of existence? As fond as I am of him, I would _never_ take sides in a mortal conflict to that extent... and part of the reason I'm fond of him is that he'd never ask me to. I'd probably have to pull teeth to get him to ask me about the cloaked Dominion warships.

So no. I'd make an absolutely abysmal spy.


	24. The Longest Day

**Prompt: What was the longest day of your life?**

I don't normally count my life in days. In the Continuum, we don't have a sun, or any external marker of time passing, and we don't sleep, so the only way to tell how long something has been is with our internal time senses. Which are fantastic, don't get me wrong - unlike most of you, I can detect the passage of "time" in dimensions where time does not exist, since I carry the ability to generate time internally, with the appropriate senses to go with such an ability - but they don't lend themselves to dividing time into "days".

There has been only one event in my life that I actually count in days, since I was mortal at the time. And yes, it was REALLY REALLY LONG. Even though, objectively, it wasn't actually a full day at all. The time that I was human, and powerless, seemed to last significantly longer than certain aeons I've lived through did. I suppose the old human adage, "Time flies when you're having fun", is true in converse as well - time drags near-infinitely when you're more miserable than you've ever been in your existence.

So. What can I say about this experience that I didn't already discuss in detail, _ad nauseam?_ It was horrible, it terrified me, and it took me quite some time to recover from the fear and regain my internal equilibrium. If you haven't yet read all the sordid details, I've already written about the experience itself(*1), and about the depressing cowardice (*2) that I displayed for several years after the event. So what else is there to say?

How about this? I don't regret it.

**No, I'm quite serious.**

I'm sure this is going to come as a massive shock to some of you. In fact it comes as a massive shock to _me_, but then, I have gone on record several (*3) times (*4) saying that I would not willingly change my own past even if I could, so perhaps it was predictable. Still and all, it was the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and that includes being brutally attacked and then thrown into a pocket dimension to rot in darkness for forty years until I recovered, and I'm still kinda pissed off (*5) at the guy who arranged for it to happen, so it does sound rather odd that I should stand up and say that I'm perfectly fine with it now.

And, well, I'm not perfectly fine with it. I'm still not happy that it _had_ to happen. I can't say I enjoy remembering it. But if I'm not to be a hypocrite... I've always believed that anything you can learn from was a worthwhile experience, and it's not often that I actually discover anything I didn't already know, nowadays. The things I learned weren't pleasant - among other things, I learned that rather than being the reckless, fearless, intrepidly daring being I'd always thought myself to be, when faced with dangers I had never imagined myself capable of being faced with I turn out to be a sniveling coward - but knowledge doesn't have to be pleasant to be valuable. And after I've spent my entire existence teaching mortals harsh truths about themselves they really didn't want to know by tormenting them, I'd be a hypocrite to say that what's good for them isn't good for me. Much as I disliked eating my spinach, in the long run I suppose it had vitamins after all.

So. I suppose most of this is a complete tangent from the concept of "the longest day", but I think that when I described it last time I got across the notion that it was interminably long. I'd rather say something new that isn't quite related to the question than repeat myself.

* * *

_1. "Q & A", chp 27, "Scary Stories"; 2. "Q & A", chp. 38, "Heavy Is The Burden of Being Me"; 3. "Q & A", chp. 8, "April Fools Day 1"; 4. "Hee's Back!" chp. 3, "Trying to answer stupid questions"; 5. "Q & A" chp. 34, "Betrayal"_


	25. Scaring people for fun and profit

_Prompt: BOO! How would you go about scaring someone?_

You know, I'm actually inordinately fond of scaring people. I suppose that means I'm a bad person, but I don't really care.

**But it has to have a point.**

I don't, however, enjoy scaring people _just_ to scare them. I'm aeons past that. (Well, except for the Borg. Terrorizing the Borg is not just fun, it's an important job that every Q should take a turn at. We need to make sure they maintain a healthy respect for and fear of us, and don't turn that marvelous analytic engine of theirs onto trying to find _our_ weaknesses, especially now that we've realized we have some. Since we probably look to the Borg like the fantasy of perfection they want to achieve, they would most certainly devote a lot of their mental energy to figuring out how to assimilate us, or duplicate what we've done, if not for the fact that they're well aware that at any time, for any reason, from anywhere in the universe, one of us might spontaneously decide to turn one of their cubes inside out while it's traveling at high warp. Mm, Borg bits. But I digress.)

What I'm very fond of doing - and very good at doing, so the Continuum has had me in their Rolodex as the go-to guy any time this kind of job needed to get done - is terrorizing mortals into evolving, saving their own skins, or both. Oh, occasionally it doesn't work, and no matter how much of the fear of Me I put into them, they can't get it together to pass my test or solve the problem I'm trying to get them to solve, and this usually results in massive quantities of death and destruction... usually _not_ doled out by yours truly. Mind you, I can generate quite terrifying consequences to an individual for failing a test... but it's almost always nothing in comparison to what the universe is going to do to them if they can't produce the results I was hoping to get them to perform.

Let me give you an example.

The planet Laon used to orbit around a dwarf yellow star, kind of like Earth around Sol except further away, so it was darker and colder. The people were mostly albinos, and kept it that way by aborting "defective" babies with pigment. This was just a tiny symptom of their overall problem - a love of their own status quo, of stagnation, a terror of evolution. They kept all their people similar-looking and similar-thinking; they were telepaths and empaths, and they liked to exert mind control on their dissidents to keep everyone in line.

They also had a deadly fear of space. Highly advanced technology - they lived in tall skyscrapers built with antigravitic technologies, healed any injury they suffered, had tripled their own lifespan, were great at keeping most of their planet clean and pristine and using renewable energy efficiently... but they were afraid of the sky. In their mythologies, the sky was never Heaven, or the home of the gods; they had chthonic gods, and the sky was the home of demons. They huddled in their homes at night because the stars were the eyes of devils that might want to swoop down and eat their souls, or something stupid like that. And so, for all their advanced technology, they were totally unaware that their sun was unstable and about to go nova within the next 200 years or so. And had they figured it out, they wouldn't have done anything about it, because they'd have been in denial to the end. Just think about how good the Kryptonians, with all _their_ technology, were at figuring out their planet was going to blow up.(1) Mortals really don't like hearing that their entire way of life is going to have to change, or they'll die. Usually, in such circumstances, they deny it until it's too late, and then they do all die.

Now, I _could_ have just fixed their sun, but where's the fun in that? They were boring people whose habit of suppressing dissidence offended me. I wanted to see them shaken up a little, forced to evolve. Of course they weren't going to evolve into anything that might interest me if their sun went nova, so I needed to scare them off their planet. And this was going to take some doing, as terrified as they were of space.

I appeared to them as a woman, because they were a matriarchal society and tend to look at women as authorities. In every other respect, however, my chosen form was designed to screw with their heads. I looked like a member of their species (humanoid, with unusually big eyes), except that I had _dark_ hair - not just a little hair pigment, but a lot. (Sue me, I like dark hair on species that have the stuff.) I was tall, nearly 2 meters when their people usually clock in at 160 cm tops. And I told them I was a demon from space, here to claim their planet. I called myself Emaroth (it doesn't mean anything, but it has vague connotations of judgement and interrogation, which is kind of what I was going for with the letter Q also. What, you didn't seriously think an immortal omnipotent species that's been around since before Sol was a wink in the galaxy's eye actually is named after the seventeenth letter of the Terran Roman alphabet? It's a translation. Mortals can't comprehend our actual name.) They decided to call me Daisheneon as a title (it's a pun, and means either great empress or great demon, both of which suited me just fine.)

I told them that I had laid claim to their entire planet and all the people on it, and every year I would take 1,000 of their best and brightest to serve me in Hell. And then I did it. Except that "Hell" was actually a harsh, hot, climactically violent planet that can't decide whether it wants to be a rainforest or a desert, and every year I dumped 1,000 healthy, highly intelligent adult Laon'l with as much genetic variation as they'd actually left in their species there.

Back on Laon, they were scared witless... or in some cases, scared witful. The dumber ones tried to destroy me (didn't even get close), mind control me (burned out their brains), or propitiate me. (That one pissed me off, actually. Some of them were sacrificing children to me in hopes that I would be satisfied and leave them alone. I had no great love for mortal children then - in fact now that I have a kid of my own I _still_ have no great love for mortal kids - but I find the concept of child sacrifice to be the ultimate hypocrisy. The idea is supposed to be that you sacrifice children because they're worth more than you are, but no one who actually commits child sacrifice sincerely does believe that the children are worth more than their own precious skin. Besides, children can't consent to be sacrificed. So I resurrected the latest batch of kids when I found out about it, and dumped the sacrificers into the planetary core.) For obvious reasons, nothing they tried to do to or for _me_ worked, and I spent my time taunting their leaders, telling some that they looked pretty smart and were they sure they didn't want to go to Hell with me?, others that they could guarantee their safe place on Laon because they were just too idiotic to be worth taking with me.

When you set up the sacrifice of a class that doesn't include the leadership class, leaders are willing to make sacrifices. Virgin daughters, the teind of youthful Fae to hell, children, wives or husbands, whatever. Politicians, on every world, are self-serving, and they're more willing in general to sacrifice loved ones than themselves. But politicians do tend to think they're the best and brightest. And I took some. The very first year I removed the Lao'llehen, the chief executive of the planet. She was kind of old, but her genes were good so I deaged her to a fit young thing who could still fight giant lizards and have babies before I dumped her in Hell. The vice-Lao'llehen took me _really_ seriously after that. Scientists all think they're the best and the brightest too, and I took some of those as well. So the people who actually had the power to direct the planet's resources to escaping me were _very_ motivated to do it.

They figured out within the first fifteen years that they couldn't escape me by burrowing into the planet; I laid claim to all of it. They could only be free of me if they got _off_ the planet. Three generations later they had a workable generation ship. A mere twenty years before the supernova, a billion Laon'l evacuated their homeworld in generation ships, and fled to a world that they called, creatively, New Laon. The million or so people who refused to evacuate because they figured I'd never get around to taking them were all very surprised when their sun blew up, but only for about a millisecond or two before they were too vaporous to feel surprise, or anything.

Meanwhile, in the 180 years I'd been harassing them, I'd populated the new planet (which they called Scamara... which, funnily enough, means "Hell" in Laon'l and now means "Home" in Scamaran) with 180,000 Laon'l, enough to overcome any founder effect. A third of them died, but 120,000 is still a viable starter population for a colony. And _they_ evolved. They had no choice. Most Scamarans are pigmented now, and their psionic abilities have gone from mostly being wifty empathy and some telepathy to really hard-core telepathy and some telekinesis. And their society has dissent, factionalization, arguments, conflicts, and very little orthodoxy of any kind. They're highly adaptable people... now. The original Laon'l still mostly suck, but even they've generated a few dissidents now and then.

Of course they all blame me for blowing up their star. Once the light got to them and they could actually see what had happened to their original homeworld, they were _very_ upset with me, being that they weren't bright enough to figure out that the thing was going to blow up anyway - they think I destroyed their world out of spite that they got away, or something. Both peoples invoke the name of Emaroth whenever they need to swear at something, and they still scare their kids with stories about me. I haven't gone back there in material form... they don't need to be terrorized again. Not yet, anyway. We'll see if their luck holds out.

* * *

Notes: (1) "A Friendly Piece of Advice" - in which Q and Jor-El have a chat about the Kryptonians not figuring out their planet was going to blow up


	26. Just insert another pun about catchup

_Prompt: Which fictional character would you like to be? _

I already am a fictional character in numerous timelines. In fact, so are most of you.

_Prompt: What words would you like to see added to/removed from common use? _

I would dearly like to see the words "portmanteau", "de rigeur", "psychopomp" and "eidolon" used much more often than they already are.

To be honest, I am not the person to be adding words _to_ your language. Until you make up a word to describe a concept, I have no way of knowing whether your primitive mind can even comprehend the concept or not. That being said, I really do wish you had more verb tenses to describe alternate futures, pasts that didn't happen and presents that are occurring in some other timeline.

As for removing a word... sadly, removing a word rarely removes the concept from your minds. But if I could remove a concept from anyone's mind, it would be "propriety". (Not "proprietary"; I can on occasion be _quite_ fond of that word.) The concept of the right and proper thing to do based on the traditional rules of a society is an idea I would dearly love to make everyone in the universe forget. Sadly, although I actually have the power to do that to mortals, it's really the Q I'd find it most useful to remove the concept from, and _that_ I can't do.

_Prompt: Write page 57 of your 300-page autobiography. _

The only way I could get my autobiography down to 300 pages is by micro-compressing it, so here:

µ

Did you get that? If you just received a burst transmission containing a summary of approximately 5 million years, good for you. If all you see is some random symbol, your brain's too primitive to handle my compression algorithm.

_Prompt: What's the most embarrassing thing you've ever done while sober? _

While I have done many, many embarrassing things in my eternal existence... seriously attempting to make William Riker a Q must rank up there with one of the most hideously embarrassing things I've ever done.

I'd say "sucking up to Worf", when I lost my powers and was trying to talk him out of throwing me in the brig, but I don't consider the state of having my vast consciousness compressed into the tiny space of a human brain to be exactly _sober._

_Prompt: What do you hope for? _

Better questions next time?


	27. Five Years

_Prompt: "Five Years" (David Bowie song)_

So the planet Semora was _just_ technologically advanced enough to realize that an asteroid was headed its way and would impact them in five years (technically, four of their years, or five Earth years and two Earth months, but who wants to be anal about it?) but not advanced enough to figure out how to prevent it. This is where I came in.

**The tale of Semora's five years to live.**

As you might imagine, chaos reigned at first. People were looting, murdering, raping, because hey, we have only five years to live, why not break all social rules and do whatever we want? Governments fell. Rather short-lived wars broke out. I say short-lived because people quickly realized that as pointless as _anything_ was on a planet where all life would be destroyed in five years, wasting time on killing one another _en masse_ was especially pointless. And before long, society stabilized. Life went on. People put their impending doom out of their heads, mostly. Those that couldn't killed themselves.

Except for Eirhean.

Eirhean was one of their top scientists. She had three husbands and four children, and she was a nuclear physicist, and she couldn't allow herself to simply give up and let her children die. Or at least that's what she told me, when I asked her why she didn't give up. She had the notion that it should be theoretically possible to reach the asteroid and detonate a sufficiently large charge on it that it would be redirected, so it wouldn't be pulled into Semora's gravity well and their people would be spared. Since she had been working on the atom bomb, she had a strong sense that a nuclear explosion _might_ be big enough to knock the asteroid off course. All she needed to do was a. solve the problem of the atom bomb, single-handedly, because all government funding into weapons had dried up completely when the Semorans collectively realized the futility of war and b. single-handedly develop rocket science and space travel to the point where nuclear missiles could be fired at the asteroid, because Semora didn't even have a space program yet.

I told her it was completely pointless and she should simply give up and accept her fate. Which, you know, was absolutely true. There was no way a single mortal, however intelligent and driven, could develop nuclear weaponry _and_ a space program by herself. She would have been better off spending her time with her children and husbands. Instead she was so focused on doing everyhting she could to save their lives that she became completely uninvolved in their lives - cold, distant, a workaholic who was too irritable to stand being around the loved ones she was trying to save. One of her husbands left her, and took his daughter with him when he did. The other two husbands and three kids basically forgot that they _had_ a wife and mother. It was a terrible decision and I told her so.

She told me to be helpful or to shut the hell up.

See, this is the kind of thing I like to see in mortals. Eirhean thought of me as a god, at first, but quickly revised her opinion and started treating me as, well, what I am... a person who was not of her species. Since her people hadn't even invented space travel yet, I thought this was pretty big of her. Admittedly treating me as a person, for most mortals, involves a lot of yelling at me, arguing with me, insulting me and telling me to go away, but this is a vast improvement over throwing themselves at my feet in prostrate worship. Eirhean told me, over and over, that she would not accept defeat; that until the day the asteroid hit, she would keep fighting to find a way to save her children, and the whole world if she could.

So, mm, I might have, shall we say, helped her out a tad. I mean, come on. If the asteroid had shown up fifteen years later the Semorans would have been in good shape to do _something_ about it, so, you know, what difference did it make? I mean, fifteen years isn't much to the Q, so I couldn't see why the Continuum'd be upset about it. All I did was give her knowledge she'd have gotten herself if she had enough time.

After one year, Eirhean had solved the problem of creating an atomic bomb. Three years in, Eirhean successfully built a prototype nuclear-powered rocket ship, and persuaded her government to send an expedition to the asteroid to plant nukes (it turned out the missile option wasn't feasible because the precision required for the explosions would be too great.) So with great fanfare the Semorans sent off a team of Big Damn Heroes, including one of Eirhean's remaining husbands, to go blow up the asteroid and save the world.

They failed miserably. They blew _themselves_ up and shattered the asteroid, knocking about a third of it away, but the remaining portions that were still on course were _more_ than enough to destroy life on Semora completely.

I politely suggested to Eirhean that the giving up option might be her most attractive alternative. She told me to go to hell. See, she was getting a lot less polite as time went on, too. In fact, she had a big argument with me in which she told me I was an amoral monster for standing around watching her planet in its death throes without doing anything to help. Interestingly, she said that it would have been different if I'd never interacted with her, if I had never talked to her; if I had only been a disinterested god, observing from on high, she didn't think I would have had any obligation to help. But now I had involved myself directly with her species, by speaking to her as if we were on the same level, and _now_ if I wouldn't help I was actively evil.

It was a completely specious argument, of course. I am the same me whether I choose to interact with mortals or not, and I am under no obligation to aid them in any way. Nonetheless, I thought about what she'd said a good deal as the day of Semora's death approached. The universe is not a fair place, and hard work and clean living don't always save the day, and Big Damn Heroes sometimes screw up the best-laid plans and doom themselves and their world, and no matter how desperate a mother is to save her kids' lives, sometimes she just _can't._ Eirhean was a brilliant woman, but she was only mortal. There was nothing she could do, and that was just the way it was, and this should not in any way have obligated me to do a damn thing about it.

Sometimes, though, on _rare_ occasions, my sentimental streak overrides my common sense.

In my defense, it wasn't until Eirhean herself finally gave up, when the tides were swallowing the coastlines and the asteroid was as visible in the sky as Earth's moon is and the impact was expected later that afternoon, when the whole world held its breath waiting to die and Eirhean herself finally held her children in her arms and cried, that I became too overwhelmed with sentiment to think straight. The truth was, she was right, but not for the reasons she thought. I had no obligation, no moral duty to help these mortals. In fact I probably shouldn't have, especially considering what came later. But by involving myself with them, talking to them, I'd come to _care_ about them... a dangerous state for a Q. And when I saw Eirhean finally break down and admit defeat, on the day she expected her whole world to die, I realized that I would miss them when they were gone.

So I turned the asteroid into water, and misted it into the atmosphere. It rained everywhere for a week and there were floods, but no asteroid and no planetary death.

The people of Semora were stunned. Firstly, because they'd expected to die, had been living their lives for the past five years in the expectation of death, and now all of a sudden they were going to live. Secondly, because what I did was a flagrant violation of the laws of physics and by their beliefs shouldn't have been possible, unless something supernatural had occurred. Even Eirhean had never known the full extent of my power; she had been thinking of me as being something more like, oh, like humans are now, with their starships and their transporters and whatnot - something she could imagine becoming, with technology. She simply wasn't advanced enough to imagine how technology could become so advanced the interface between it and the self could vanish, and it could do things that seemed blatantly impossible.

She decided I'd been a god the entire time. And worse, told everyone on her planet that I was a god. And gave up science to proselytize her newfound worship of me.

I was kind of disgusted, so I left, hoping things would cool down. They didn't. When I got back, fifty years later, Eirhean's grandson was the head of the religion dedicated to worshipping me, and there had already been schisms and disagreements as to exactly what I wanted them to do and infidels had already been imprisoned or killed for refusing to sing songs of praise and gratitude to me. All the progress they'd made during the days when they thought they were going to die, all the peace and unity and all the understanding of how petty their little tribal conflicts really were, all gone, and the worst of it was their belief that this was what I _wanted._

So I told the entire planet to leave me alone, that their worship was like the whining of annoying small insects to me, and that if anyone mentioned my name one more time I was going to blow the planet up. And just to prove that I was not a nice guy who would benevolently save them all from whatever disasters they were too stupid to figure out how to save themselves from, I dropped another asteroid on them. To be fair, this one was _much_ much smaller, and only ended up killing five percent of the planet through the initial shockwave and then the famines that occurred when the dust cloud caused a three-year winter. But it got my point across.

On Semora, it is now a capital offense to mention my name, so they call me the Nameless One. Half of them still think I'm a god, but not a very nice one. The other half think I'm a demon. They've colonized another planet in their solar system, but they haven't developed warp drive yet. And sadly, none of them so far have been half as smart as Eirhean was before I broke her brain by saving her planet.


	28. Mostly abysmally pathetic questions

Oh dear Me, these questions just get worse over time, don't they?

Let's get the lame questions out of the way first, shall we?

**Absurdly inappropriate questions**

_Prompt: What did you dream last night?_

I didn't. Because I DON'T DREAM, due to the fact that I am not mortal and I DON'T SLEEP.

_Prompt 237: It's your birthday! If anything were possible, what would be your perfect way to celebrate?_

I don't have a birthday. Time for the Q doesn't run in cycles that come back around again; it just runs. There was a day that (*1)I came into existence, but it was the _only_ such day; there is no day that is just like that day except part of a different cycle. So the concept of a birthday is meaningless to me. Now, (*2) April Fool's Day, (*3)_there's_ a reason to celebrate. But since time in the Continuum doesn't match time in your universe anyway, I can come out on any April Fool's Day I want and celebrate it; I don't actually need to wait, or to put up with having to do it every year.

_Prompt: Write about receiving a present that was not what you had hoped for._

Nobody gives me presents. Possibly because I don't have a birthday. Or possibly because I'm _OMNIPOTENT_ and therefore, anything I want, I can get for myself, instantly. If anyone _did_ give me a present, I suppose it wouldn't be something I'd hoped for, in the sense that I wouldn't have expected it, but since no one ever has (well, if you don't consider saving my life (*4) to be a present, which I don't, because how would you get wrapping paper around that?), I never actually have gotten a present, hoped for or not.

_Prompt: "Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?" Marcel Marceau._

Wasn't he a mime?

_Prompt: What event do you wish you could have been a "fly on the wall" for?_

To wish it would imply that it's not possible, plausible or feasible. In fact I can go lurk as a _literal_ fly on the wall if I want to for any situation whatsoever, including ones where in actual fact there would have been no flies, or walls. But, to be honest, it's easier just to watch stuff from a noncorporeal form. Being a fly isn't all it's cracked up to be.

_Prompt: Talk about a moment in which you wished you had a camera._

Again. I don't need a camera. I'm a Q. I have a perfect memory and even if I didn't everything I experience is recorded to the Continuum every time I use my powers or look up information.

_Prompt: You've just won an award! What would it be and why?_

The Continuum's "Infinite Patience" Award for actually putting up with these questions.

Okay, now that the ridiculous ones are out of the way...

I was going to classify this one as ridiculous too, and then I realized that I actually _can_ say something interesting in response to this.

**I enjoy being a girl!... ok, ok, I'll stop singing. You'd think I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket the way you people carry on.**

_Prompt: You've woken up as the opposite sex this morning... now what?_

Yes, "now what?" would be the question I'd ask as well, but I'd mean it in the sense of "and now what, am I supposed to care about this situation?" Firstly, I don't wake up, since I don't sleep, and secondly, I don't have an inherent gender.

I do frequently present myself as male because it fits my archetype – among humanoids, the trickster, the rule-breaker, the avatar of Chaos and fun and misrule is usually male. Females who represent Chaos usually represent the chaotic force of sex, whereas males get to be both dangerous and funny… and sex, while entertaining enough, is really not all that important. Being funny is much more important than being sexy. So I prefer a male form.

But I've taken female form, when it suited me. So let me tell you some stories about times I was a woman.

**Metraxia:**

On the planet Metraxia, the humanoids who live there would be quite vigorous up-and-comers, being inventive, rapid-changing and generalists like humanity, except with significantly better reaction time. But they're run by a horrifically repressive government, and they treat the female half of their species worse than cattle (you don't have to break the spirits of cattle to make them act like cattle; they just do. Fellow sentient humanoids, on the other hand, you need to do horrific things to if you want them to behave like cattle.) I mean, these are people who thought it was a great stride forward for women's rights that if a man rapes a virgin, he's just automatically married her and has to support her for the rest of her life. The concept that, y'know, maybe she'd rather not marry a rapist? Not a consideration to the Metraxans. And this _is_ a great stride forward, because previously, it meant that she was permanently ruined and would have to be supported by her family for the rest of her life, which would be vastly shortened because her family would put her to death for being a burden. Nice folks.

The previously mentioned horrifically repressive government of Metraxia does very nasty things to stay in power. Male dissidents (or men suspected of being dissidents, or male relatives of dissidents) are tortured to death if they're over the age of about 9. Common criminals of either sex – thieves, murderers, etc – are enslaved and put to work doing really nasty, dangerous jobs such as mining, as are female dissidents who are elderly or considered unattractive. Attractive female dissidents, and male and female children unlucky enough to have dissident parents, are enslaved in brothels and forced to work as prostitutes, until they're too old (teens in the case of the boys and middle-aged in the case of the girls and women), at which point they go to the mines. Again, real nice folks.

So I decided to teach the leaders a lesson. I showed up in a female form, precisely because they think so little of women and thus an omnipotent woman they couldn't kill, rape or control would enrage and scare the living daylights out of them, told them exactly what I thought of their society's tactics, and then turned the entire ruling council (which was, of course, all rich men from society's top strata) into women and dumped them into their own brothels. Sadly, this doesn't appear to have had the effect I wanted, because they haven't changed tactics at all since I reversed it. Maybe I'll have to go back there one of these days and do it again.

At the same time, I met this fascinating feminist revolutionary, Talith Estar, who was imprisoned in the brothels at the time, and thought her belief that she could transform her world – from prison, no less - was so audacious and ridiculously overconfident that I had to see what she'd do if I gave her the power to do it. So I granted her one wish. And her one wish was that I send her and all the other women in the brothels and mines and other imprisonments to a safe place where she could build a wondrous utopia without men. (She didn't think of the boys, I'm sad to say – revolutionaries can be very short-sighted.) So I created an identical copy of her planet without any people on it, set it orbiting around a similar star, and sent all the women there. (On my own recognizance, I sent all the boys to Neverland. Better to never become adults than remain slaves, and I thought they were probably too damaged to ever fit in to a normal society again. Neverland's full of boys who don't want to grow up; I thought they'd fit right in.)

Of course her perfect feminist utopia is anything but, as the women there spend a significant amount of their time fighting with each other over stupid crap, but hey, at least they're not slaves anymore. Unfortunately, now they all worship me as some kind of goddess, and frankly I find that really annoying. I was planning to give them some kind of parthenogenetic reproduction so they could keep their society going, but nope, not anymore. Either they get over worshipping me or I'm gonna let them all die out. Or maybe I'll re-introduce a few men, see what happens. That could be good for some laughs.

**Kyreer:**

I used to have this close friend (*5) whose big thing was love. She often took female form among humanoid species because most humanoid species, despite claiming that women are somehow more susceptible to love, personify love as a woman, and she used to like to be the goddess of love or something like that. She also found it absolutely hilarious to make people, mostly male humanoids, do really, really stupid things for love.

Now, my thing, as you probably all know by now, is to make people do really, really stupid things because they are stupid and I know how to hit their buttons, not so much for love. So about a thousand years ago, we had this bet going, where she would try to get some laughs my way and I would try hers. Only, being that I don't consider the personal destruction of an individual mortal for the sake of love very funny, I had to take it over the top. So I became Tajitan, a really sexy female demon from the mythology of the planet Kyreer, and I appeared to the two sons of the emperor of the planet. Whichever one of them defeated his brother, I said, would win my love.

They totally fell for it. They plunged their planet into a vicious civil war, fighting with each other for control over the world. What was even better was that their sister, Keth'wyn, saw through me completely. I mean, she thought I was doing it because I was an evil demon and I liked seeing people die, not because I had a bet going with a friend and I thought seeing war break out over who gets to pork a demon was totally hilarious, but she did realize that my entire goal was not to make either of the brothers love me but to make total fools out of both of them. What was even better was that, having seen through me, she launched this counter-revolution among the women of Kyreer, where she argued that men are frail reeds who will do anything for sex with a hot chick even if she's a bitch, or a demoness, and that therefore the women of Kyreer needed to put an end to this war by demanding equal power with men, as men had just proven themselves to not only not be superior as they claimed to be, but actually to be idiots. What's more, since a significant number of the men of Kyreer agreed that being made to fight and kill each other because some prince wanted hot demon lovin' was just all kinds of ridiculous, her campaign worked. Both the princes were overthrown, Keth'wyn became the first Empress of Kyreer, and the first thing she did as Empress was to institute a check on the power of the Emperor/Empress by creating a representative body of nobles and commoners who had veto power over war and taxes.

Funny thing is? I would have totally done her. I mean, the princes were idiots and unworthy of my time, except for the laughs they brought me, but Keth'wyn's intelligence, foresight and ability to beat my game when she wasn't even supposed to be playing? I've mentioned before I find those traits really, really hot in a mortal. So I kept turning up as Tajitan to give her advice (that she didn't take, because it was coming from a demon, so I generally told her to do the exact opposite of whatever I thought was a good idea), taunt her into expanding her horizons, and generally make a constructive nuisance of myself until she finally died. Toward the end I think she might have realized I was a little more complex than the demon she thought I was, but sadly, she refused my offer to make her immortal and take her off the planet to explore the universe with me, so in the end she went the way of all mortal flesh and I found something else interesting to do.

My friend mocked me, claiming that in the process of trying to play a game involving love, I ended up falling in love with a mortal myself. But I wasn't in love with Keth'wyn. Not really. Okay, maybe just a little bit, but not like... um, some other mortals I've had dealings with more recently.

**Laon and Scamara:**

I actually described my adventures as Emaroth, demoness of Laon (*6), recently, so go read about it if you care.

**That time Riker made Picard take shore leave and he was going to stay in his room and read Dixon Hill novels the whole time until I showed up:**

Yeah... not going to go into detail about that one. Suffice it to say, a lady never tells.

* * *

(*1) "Heee's BACK!" chp 20, "First Memory" (*2) "Q & A", "April Fools Day 1", Chp. 8 (*3) "Q & A", "April Fools Day 2", Chp. 40 (*4) "Q & A", "More of these silly questions?", chp. 9 (*5) "Heee's BACK!" chp 9, "Bestest Pals" (*6) "Heee's BACK!" chp. 25, "Scaring people for fun and profit"


End file.
